Cal Freeman


Schedule K-1 Form from Southern Pennsylvania Propane Company as a Non-Fungible Token


My mother’s CPA says she needs a K-1 form
from the Southern Pennsylvania Propane Company,
a pass-through entity she’s apparently invested in.
He tells me they are tax harvesting her losers.

I don’t understand what any of this means,
but it sounds like the language of my father’s death,
the kind of language I’ve been hearing
since my father’s death. Bloodless drivel
that keeps everyone arm’s length from what’s at stake.

I imagine a poem called “Instructions for the Passing Spirit.”
I write, Pass through the provisional entity
of the body into the southern Allegheny gorges
and lacustrine pools that wane
in the February sun. Harvest what is reticent
to yield, harvest the organs that were treated
gently during his life (she told you
at the time of his death that your father
had given the gift of life).

It was impossible to get over there last week
in the freezing rain. The trees were cut-glass candelabras diaphanous
in their ice. There was a precarity in their beauty.
We knew the limbs could break and knock
the power out or worse. Our world
was so conductive then, stray voltage everywhere.

But today the afternoon unspools without effect,
like the macadam along the flat road
to her house. The dumbest dog
my parents ever owned, the last dog they
owned together was euthanized last month.
My mother seemed unfazed. I listen
for its signature racket as I walk up
to the crumbling stoop, folded quire of papers
in my left hand, the waspy soffits
pissing down the run-off ice. I recall
something good from last December,
pan-fried pickerel on Willow china,
dry German Riesling in Waterford flutes,
my mother reciting Alfred Noyse
and Eugene Field while drinking wine.

photo Matt Balcer

Cal Freeman is the author of the books Fight Songs (Eyewear 2017) and Poolside at the Dearborn Inn (R&R Press 2022). His writing has appeared in many journals including Permafrost, The Poetry Review, Verse Daily, Berfrois, The Moth, Oxford American, River Styx, and Hippocampus. His poems have been anthologized in The Poet's Quest for God (Eyewear 2016), I Wanna Be Loved By You: Poems On Marilyn Monroe (Milk & Cake Press 2021), What Things Cost: An Anthology for the People (University Press Kentucky 2022), and Beyond the Frame (Diode Editions 2023). He is a recipient of the Devine Poetry Fellowship (judged by Terrance Hayes), winner of Passages North's Neutrino Prize, and a finalist for the River Styx International Poetry Prize. Born and raised in Detroit, he teaches at Oakland University and serves as Writer-In-Residence with InsideOut Literary Arts Detroit.

ISSN 2472-338X
© 2023