Dear Son

Therese Svoboda

It’s the day before the day before.
The sky is still blue. Which vessel for the DNA –
lightship or coal barge or helicopter-padded yawl?

Best know the route: weather is not your forte.
Drowning is a matter for all hands, one set yours.
Skyless, ocean-blank, the future storm where we split,

your boat becalmed over the drowned or rent, my Help!
loud, then not. Giant waves sluice genes as many
as sunken stars, or boxes that don’t float.

Terese Svoboda's Professor Harriman's Steam Air-Ship, her most recent book of poetry, was published in 2016. Anything That Burns You: A Portrait of Lola Ridge, Radical Poet was published in paper in 2018, and Great American Desert, a book of stories, in 2019. "Terese Svoboda is one of those writers you would be tempted to read regardless of the setting or the period or the plot or even the genre.”--Bloomsbury Review.