Liturgy
He has been parked in his armchair
for three years wearing two hats,
a knit for warmth over a visor
for the lamp’s glare stacked on his head
like a miter for a bishop who has forgotten
the order of the Mass, the right words
to ripen the wine. He recalls a wedding
from decades ago but cannot consign it
to who he is now. He sees no angels
in the gap, only a prowling stranger
of himself in the folds of a robe
of stippled memories hanging
from his retreating frame. His children
rise from the living room sofa to slip
the cloak back over his shoulders
if only for a short while until the day
when it falls entirely to the floor
and he will be naked in the eyes of time.
In the meanwhile, he insists on recalling
the color of the wastebasket in the kitchen:
blue. And he is right.
Gone
After his second wife left him
for sobriety, my father moved
to the next subdivision over,
the cul-de-sacs crowding with
young families and kids playing
on lawns. He faced down
the coming decade in a faux
leather recliner and a bottle
of cut-rate vodka. Weeds
marched over the yard.
The neighbors complained.
Children whispered
about a ghost living there.
He died on a Tuesday
morning, reaching for his
blood pressure pills.
As we cleared the house,
I notice the cigarette left lit
but unsmoked, a tail of ash
from the filter to the bottom
of a chipped saucer he used
as an ashtray, waiting for him
on the kitchen counter.
It was like that with him,
not so much as a puff
and he was gone.
Christopher Stewart
Christopher Stewart is the author of What Came After (The Calliope Group) and co-author (with Quraysh Ali Lansana) of The Walmart Republic (Mongrel Empire Press). His poems have recently appeared or will appear in Midwest Quarterly, RHINO, Oberon, Bryant Literary Review, Oakwood, Connecticut River Review, Eastern Iowa Review, Atlanta Review, and others. He is the recipient of the 2025 RHINO Poetry Founder’s Prize and was a 2023 finalist for the Iowa Review Award, among other recognitions.
Header image by Tymur Kuchumov
