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POETRY

Something Softer

By Travis Truax





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What I name father or field
could be          fossil.
 
Could be Virginia’s    haze.
Could be         faith.
 
It’s true. What bridges do
is take the open palms
 
of two places, and give them
a single story.
 
What rivers     do        is bridge.
What oceans do          is hold.
 
I try to recognize         the hands
that made this middle distance.
 
How the past    peels away today,
gives it another           life.
 
When my father          left church
with football    on his mind
 
he still took the slow way       home,
made sure the river
 
wrapped us up             every Sunday.
So the story could stick.
 
So we learned something softer
than just another road.
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About This Unit: Poems on Family and Finding Other Lines of Symmetry



TRAVIS TRUAX grew up in Virginia and Oklahoma and spent most of his twenties working in various national parks out west. A graduate of Southeastern Oklahoma State University, his work has appeared in Salamander, Quarterly West, Bird’s Thumb, The Pinch, Colorado Review, and Phoebe. He Lives in Bozeman, Montana, where he is hard at work on publishing his first chapbook.  

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