Four Omens in Three Days

Doug Ramspeck

Our father is lying again on the kitchen floor

when my brother and I come down the stairs

in our pajamas. Dull light carves him in two.

Centaur man. Half light, half shadow.

Everything in this dawn grayness has

its membrane. The moon, which hasn’t yet

given up, has a corona, and a scar tissue

of snow has collected overnight in the yard.

First light has its secret names carved into

the smoke rising from the neighbor’s chimney,

the hour drawn taut as piano wire, our father’s

boots overturned beside him. Another day we found

him on the back porch, and once we spotted him

in the yard by his pickup, the first milky haze

rehearsing the body's disappearance. But here,

in this kitchen, we listen for the sounds

of his breaths. And here, in this kitchen,

the morning chill slips past the open

back door, and the broken vessels of the sky

wait with their hidden seams. The previous

afternoon, our father took us down to the river

and out across the ice. He said he liked to feel

it holding him, like to know it had hardened enough

to bear his weight. Yellow cattails swayed

in their abeyance along the bank. The ship of earth

seemed stalled. Everything in the winter woods

appeared alluvial. Our lips grew cold. And then,

as we watched, the itinerant, inevitable sun

punctured a cloud and brought down its garish glare.

And now, in this kitchen, we kneel and listen

for snores like tiny freight horns in the distance,

like little trumpets. Death, we are old enough to know,

smells like green film atop a brackish pond,

a bitter, fetid smell. When we lean closer, we inhale

stale beer. Then we hear our mother on the stairs,

see her coming into the kitchen in a robe,

and, without a moment’s hesitation, she steps

over our father and begins to prepare the batter,

and soon she is standing at the stove,

the spatula perched in her hand like a baton.

DOUG RAMSPECK is the author of ten poetry collections, two collections of short stories, and a novella. His most recent book, Smoke Memories (2025), received the Lena Shull Book Award.

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