Affirmation • Learning How To Fish Again

In my dreams, my father teaches me how to fish again.
Beneath the August sun, I watch my hands morph into his:
the alligator skin, the space between our knuckles

lined and dry like mud cracks.
I only remember the difference when he grabs
my hand to hold the fishing pole and I feel the years

of genocide and civil war,
the untouched field of landmines
stretching endlessly between us. In California,

I reimagine his life:
I hold a book of poetry. I look at my hands and see
only my father’s. I imagine my father holding

the poems. In this body, my father
does not witness the bombings or the bodies
— he only reads stories about them instead.

During lecture, I google the age
of my professor who cries every time he speaks
of tenderness in the Victorian literature he loves.

1967 — two years younger
than my father — and my hands
become my hands again, the guilt

of freedom heavy
in my palms. He never told me
the dreams he had for his own life.

All I can picture is the rural night
sky, milky and struck with stars. A river pregnant
with fish, ready for catching. My father beside me,

his right hand in a fist,
jerking up to signal stop
reeling and pull. When I dream of fish, I remember

again that I am my father’s
daughter. I do not have to reimagine his life.
In this one, we catch the fish together.