By Christopher T. Keaveney

Aggrieved became my daughter’s favorite word to sign
After we had come upon the fish dead among the rocks,

sunnies like the ones my brothers and I had caught each year at summer camp, 
rising to our hard earned spit on the lake’s surface like saints to absolution.

Fresh from spawning, dozens upon dozens careen with the water’s lapping
looking for all the world like shards of glass gleaming in the last light of day.

We had spent most of the summer vacation at the cabin learning to sign 
in anticipation of my older brother’s impending loss of hearing,

straining to the YouTube videos like fish breaching on the gravel fighting for air 
as if each new word were a commodity as rare as the cradled head of a drunken brother,

as precocious as the daughter who mastered the sign for reconciliation
in time to welcome an uncle who was always spoiling for a fight

but who finally came to understand that time spent throwing haymakers in the dark
was like the efficacy of spit to sunnies when it was the steelhead that we were after.
 

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About the Author:

Christopher T. Keaveney is a faculty member in the Global Liberal Arts Program at Rikkyo University in Tokyo. His poetry has appeared in Spoon River Poetry Review, Columbia Review, Cardiff Review, Borderlands: Texas Poetry Review, Stolen Island, Faultline and elsewhere. He is the author of the collections Your Eureka Not Mined (Broadstone Books, 2017) and The Boy Who Ate Nothing But Sonnets (Clare Songbirds Press, 2019).