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Tar Pits
The last time I saw my father
was at the La Brea Tar Pits
a year after the divorce.
He was still living in St. Louis,
running the business
to the bottom
of a fifth of Jim Beam.
In my mind’s eye
he is a specimen, a foetus
of a father, floating in a jar
in some roadside museum.
I was nine. We had nothing
to say, so he took me
to the La Brea Tar Pits, as
divorced fathers do.
He was a membrane
at that point.
An effigy trembling
in another man’s suit.
We stared
at the three-toed sloth,
the dire wolf with its
marble eyes.
My father, I wish
you could rise from that
black pit and emerge
into light, like the tiger
we saw that day,
sheathed again in muscle,
its great teeth like sabers.
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George Bilgere’s ninth collection of poetry is Cheap Motels of My Youth, which won the 2024 Rattle Chapbook Prize. In 2021 he won the New Ohio Review Editor’s Choice award. He has received grants and awards from the NEA, the Pushcart Foundation, the May Swenson Poetry Award, the Witter Bynner Foundation, and the Society of Midland Authors Poetry Prize. He teaches at John Carroll University in Cleveland, Ohio, where he lives with his wife and two exceptionally fine little boys.
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Saber Toothed Tiger lithograph, ca. 1902
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Author: Terence Winch
