Frankenstein

Thomas Stewart

You’re the poster boy

for bad fathers:

vacant, disappointed.

Built me in an image

of your making

only to bolt.

Do you like my hands?

They’re the hands

you chose

but didn’t tell me

how to use.

Here’s my voice

one I cracked

into being.

Give me someone

other than you

you who made

the board

in which

I have to ask

permission.

All I want

is love

or

an example

of love

perhaps even

the word love

to know

how it sounds.

Not the cold

press of your

shadow as you walk

away.

Build me a door, then

one I might walk

through

or give me the hammer.

THOMAS STEWART (he/him) is a Welsh writer, the author of Real Boys (Birlinn, 2024) and two pamphlets: Based on a True Story (fourteen poems, 2022) and empire of dirt (Red Squirrel Press, 2019). He is a New Writers Awardee and his work has been published in Poetry Wales, Butcher’s Dog, Best Scottish Poems 2019, The Amsterdam Quarterly, And Other Poems, The Glasgow Review of Books, The Stockholm Review of Literature, among others.