Stepmonsters

They are gone now:
he stuffed in the hole
next to mother, she

disappeared into the erasure
of Alzheimer’s, the same absence
into which (clever irony) my father un-

did himself from
memory. I am done with
fingering the bitterness. No is loss

a leaden burden I would bear. Rather
it is the dullness of
disregard, simply put

the place we find to place others
when they are no longer
of enough consequence to hate.

This article appears in Beer Me, Jesus.