Ash Bowen
Winter 2025 | Poetry
Epilogue
I find the album in my father’s shop.
The coldest day on record, the years shiver
inside the pictures held down by cellophane.
The cold is all that’s left to part the past
between my father and me, his ball peen anger,
frayed cords of fatherhood. Look here and here:
That’s him posed bluff beside the fuselage
he welded for the first Space Shuttle, his cap
askew, flint-striker clasped in hand. His eyes
leer back at me from 1980—unforgiving,
forever my mother’s getaway accomplice.
The Celsius of our conversations dipped
each year until we reached real zero. But
tonight, I’ve crept back here to Arkansas
and cut the shop’s lock off. The penlight chatters
between my teeth, the fog that forms my breath.
My finger follows a frozen hieroglyph
across the bottom of the photograph,
someone’s black cursive that spells my father’s name.
Ash Bowen is the author of two poetry collections, The Even Years of Marriage (winner, Orphic Prize, Dream Horse Press) and Other Edens (winner, 2025 Vassar Miller Prize, forthcoming in 2026). Other poems can be found in Blackbird, Rust+Moth, Passages North, New England Review, Verse Daily, and elsewhere in print and online. He has taught creative writing for multiple universities throughout the U.S. and, most recently, in Queretaro, Mexico.