Jessica Goodfellow
Winter 2025 | Poetry
Reverse Engineer
When the hospice worker asked about his career as an engineer,
my dad said, I sold something but I don’t remember what.
I remember: substations, capacitors, step-down transformers—
words I’ve heard from my dad my whole life but still
don’t know what they mean, and now neither does he.
Visiting me in Japan, my dad had marveled that power
lines still waved in the air, looped between poles, not
buried in the earth like back home—but visible,
ugly, wrecking our view of the sacred Mt. Fuji.
It’s because of the earthquakes, I told him. He nodded.
He doesn’t remember that conversation, that trip
to see me. Those details are buried deep
in his memory and won’t reappear unless something cracks
him open like an earthquake. It happens, sometimes, but
like an earthquake, no one can predict when or where.
My dad’s mind is a landscape with no power
lines—his view of the anonymous sky uncluttered,
his glimpse of the mountains unobscured by the thick black lines
of memory, which are stitched instead somewhere deep
and inaccessible. There’s nothing between him and the sacred now
Jessica Goodfellow’s books are Whiteout (University of Alaska Press, 2017), Mendeleev’s Mandala, and The Insomniac’s Weather Report. Her work has appeared in Best American Poetry, Verse Daily, and The Writer’s Almanac. She’s had work in the Beloit Poetry Review, Bennington Review, Ploughshares, Scientific American, The Southern Review, and Threepenny Review. Jessica is an American poet living in Japan.