American Dad
Sonnet
Jill Crammond
You set the world record for man in a box.
Buried beneath the ground, you are both man and bone,
father and firefighter, husband and dead. Maybe not today,
maybe not tomorrow, but one day the sun will shine
again. Your ghost spoke. At my wedding
the sun didn’t shine. But still, marriage, a missing
slice of sacred cake. One day the sun shone
again. The key stuck in the lock, lock stuck
in my throat and a son was born.
You set the world record for nights the dead
speak to the living. The sun lied about storms,
your skull glares at thunder. In this way
I left my husband. Kept the children. We ate
the cake that molded at high noon. No one died.
Jill Crammond’s poems have appeared in Limp Wrist, Tinderbox Poetry, Mom Egg Review, Pidgeonholes, Unbroken Journal, Mother Mary Come to Me Anthology, Fiolet & Wing: An Anthology of Domestic Fabulist Poetry, and others. Her work has been nominated for a Pushcart Prize, and her chapbook, Handbook for Unwell Mothers, was a finalist for the 2021 Two Sylvias Press Chapbook Prize, judged by Victoria Chang. She lives and teaches art and preschool at a forest school in upstate NY.