A poem by Matt Coppens

I can look out, into nothing
with my eyes squinted, hazy, dusty, smoky.
Hold my eyes closed and see.

I can see my mother walking beside my father’s
blue 1967 Chevy convertible, refusing to get in
as we coast slowly along, she at the roadside.
I can feel the cold white leather seats
on my young thighs and behind as my two older sisters
sit in silence beside me.

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A short story by Matt Coppens

My father lay there on the hospital bed with a bandage covering the right side of his throat from the esophagus cancer surgery he’d just had. He lay there limp, weak, helpless. My pop, the man who served 5 years in the U.S. military between 1962 and 1967, the toughest son of a bitch I’d ever known lay there not even able to lift his arms to feed himself the ice chips the nurse’s had left for him to keep his mouth from drying out too badly.

The rest of the family, my girlfriend, and brother in-law were all there, too frightened to feed him the ice chips so I did it. Leaning over him with a plastic spoon in my hand I gently dropped a few ice chips into his mouth, a thin-lipped Belgian mouth that he inherited from his father, the same thin-lipped mouth I inherited from him.

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