Father

by George Bishop

Ten years after he died
I was homeless, driven by
those unforgiving faces
beer makes out of your
own. Ten years later, sober
and sort of trusting myself,

I learned to fish again,
to string a few lies on
my life, hoping to lure
a relative or old friend
out of a distance only
I could reach. I’ll never

know what I lost one
morning, the lake and light
flashing off my eyes where
I always fished alone. Still
I kept it, took it home, only
tell the story to a mirror.

George Bishop’s work has appeared in Carolina Quarterly and Cold Mountain Review. Bishop won the 2013 Peter Meinke Prize at YellowJacket Press for his chapbook Following Myself Home and his second full-length poetry collection One Dance was published by FutureCycle Press in late 2016. He attended Rutgers University and lives and writes in Saint Cloud.