chimera

My father checked with a flashlight,
knelt at the foot of the bed
like a man about to propose to the dark,
swept the beam under the frame and said
see. nothing there.

I believed him
for exactly as long as the door stayed open a crack,
hallway light laid gold across the carpet
a moat I made him promise to keep filled.

The monster did not die.
It grew new faces,
and stayed under the bed

Now it comes in envelopes with windows,
red block letters that used to mean Christmas
and now mean thirty days.

Now it comes as a mother’s voice on the phone,
thinner than last year,
complaining of this or that ache,
and I hear the years doing math
neither of us wants to say out loud.

Now it comes dressed as the job
I clock into like a hostage reporting for the count,
cubicle walls the exact gray
of a sky that won’t commit to rain.

Now it comes as the quiet after dinner
when neither of us reaches first
for the last word,
the silence a moat all its own.

Now it comes as a mixtape I still know by heart —
every hiss and click of side B, 1985 —
nostalgia so total
I can live whole seasons inside it
and forget the shore is a direction,
not just a rumor.

There’s no flashlight for this kind of monster.
You lie there and take inventory instead:
this debt, that silence,
a parent getting slower
a little more every visit,
the man in the mirror
who still isn’t sure
he’s introduced you properly around the room.

I don’t check under the bed anymore.
I leave the hall light on and call it a system.
Some nights that’s enough.
Some nights I lie very still
and listen to it breathing
directly beneath me,
patient,
keeping track of the tab
better than I do.