Burning Ground

We couldn’t see blood hemorrhaging across the grasslands
of our father’s right brain hemisphere like a fiery
saw blade on the horizon, separating

land/smoke
father we know/don’t know.

No time for us to dig a moat around the family
history built on a one-way train ticket from Duluth to Seattle
and the oldest Luedtke girl cashiering at Schrader Drugs.

No choice what’s saved/what’s lost
of his memory store.

He recalled a love of cold milk but couldn’t name the thing
that tells time that you wear on your wrist. Lost
the steps for tying shoes, yet in capital letters

he wrote and correctly spelled
the name of each grandchild.

To fend off the scorch of his forgetting, we had to trust
the small fires we lit when our father knew us as his children.
Pray our flames burned ground enough to keep

the father who remains/
the father we mourn.

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Katy E. Ellis is the author of the novel-length prose poem, Home Water, Home Land (Tolsun Books) and three chapbooks: Night Watch, winner of the Floating Bridge chapbook competition; Urban Animal Expeditions; and Gravity, a single poem also nominated for a Pushcart Prize. Her work has appeared in Mom Egg Review, Pithead Chapel, Rise Up, American Journal of Poetry, Literary Mama, MAYDAY Magazine, Burnside Review, and in the Canadian journals PRISM International, Grain, and Fiddlehead.