Poem
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She was born beneath a silence, her first breath woven through with forgetting. They pressed a story into her skin, but the ink dissolved before it dried. She drank Lethe in her mother’s arms, unwitting, unknowing, learning the taste of absence as nourishment. Her lullabies were pauses, her cradle padded with omissions. Two fathers circled
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Each morning, they rose from the Father’s shoulders, ink-borne shadows against a paling sky. One carried memory, the other, thought— but neither ever returned unchanged. They crossed forests of silence, oceans that swallowed truth, and the trembling chambers of men who thought themselves kings. From their beaks fell whispers, half-formed, half-feared: fragments of worlds undone,
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Some boys disappear into obedience. He didn’t. He just burned. They said sit down. He stood. They said blend in. He wore fire. Applause was safer than affection. A spotlight doesn’t flinch when you get too close. He learned to read a room like a script. Smile like a threat. Charm like a blade in
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He is no longer just a man. He is a diagram. An intersection of roles: Husband, Father, Stepfather, part-time Custodian, full-time Protector. (Son?) Keeper of calm, absorber of blame, receiver of news after the fact. He exists in margins— between court orders and weekend bag zips, between birthday cake and utility bills, between the memory
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He does not cry when the door closes. He has trained himself not to. That training began when he was six, when he wasn’t allowed to bring his Easter egg home. Now, at eight, he sits up straight in the back seat of Mum’s car, a Tesco bag rustling near his feet, a hand-drawn Sonic
Reade Saunders 