Even the father in this children’s cartoon
is inadequate. Taking his kids to the pool,
he doesn’t think to bring sunscreen, hats,
towels, toys, snacks, not even water
to drink—and, to think, this episode
could have been about anything.
I’m not sure if it makes it better or worse
that no one wrote this script—not really,
not in the way I think about imagination.
⠀
In the commercial a man coughs and wheezes
in bed, blows his red nose on a tissue.
When my husband can’t sleep, the wife says
to the camera, I give him such-and-such—
what medicine exactly doesn’t matter
and varies anyway (there are many of these
commercials). What I notice is not the brand,
but the helpless, stupid man sniffling
until the woman wakes to nurse him.
⠀
When the cartoon is over, my boys and I
put on our shoes to go to the park,
where we’ll see, as we always do, many
attentive fathers, men with SPF 50 and bags
of fruit strips and pretzels, men so unlike those
on TV, the animated fathers we show our children
and the ones we watch ourselves, the “real” ones
who look more or less like us, the ones who creep,
with a button’s click, like a nagging doubt,
into our living rooms as evening fades into our dreaming,
those fathers who can’t do anything right.
Josh Luckenbach’s recent work has appeared in The Southern Review, Shenandoah, Nimrod, Birmingham Poetry Review, New Ohio Review, and elsewhere. He serves as Poetry Editor for EcoTheo Review and as Web Editor for the Coalition for Community Writing. You can find him on Instagram @joshluckenbach.