2007
Virginia Shank
Inheritance
I
One quarter century of graveyard
shifts, of climbing body-whole
into the bellies of Heidelbergs
among the gears and rollers, belts
and bearings, all aching to strike
words onto the waiting page,
so long the years of the father’s work
repairing presses two stories high,
his blood courses O negative ink,
the lines of his palms calligraphic,
by machine and tool rewritten.
II
Asleep before his daughters stepped
from the welter of school bus chatter,
he left them notes on legal pads:
Money for dinner. Call for delivery,
letters linked by thin lines of impatience
too strong to lift the pen.
Some nights they wrote him back
before bed: Need a bus pass, route 6,
homework for English with Cheri Dias,
handwriting growing from childish slant
to the purposeful caps of clarified adults.
III
She could have done anything:
horticulture, algorithms, ballet or cooking,
but she read the books he brought home,
free freak misprints with crooked spines,
covers marred, uncut edges of pages—
once a paperback with whole chapters blank
where she penned the pieces
the press withheld, then poems, stacked
stanzas and rolling belt lines, pen after pen
ink-emptied onto pages she never leaves
Author’s Bio:
VIRGINIA SHANK currently teaches and works toward her MFA in poetry at the University of Idaho in Moscow, Idaho. In addition to writing poems, Virginia also works in claymation to produce short films from her poetry. Her film "The Frigidaires of Idaho" will soon be released on DVD.