REVERSE EVALUATION > POETRY
Dying Vicariously Through Your Parents
By Sean Patrick Mulroy
Wistful and disconsolate as a giraffe that’s slowly dying at the zoo, my father looks at me. Inside him, there are animals that don’t fit anywhere, that don’t wear clothes, and won’t survive the winter. If I know he is declining, he must know it too. I wonder what that’s like, to know it’s almost over, all of it: the living world in which he moves with less and less velocity, the wilderness of joy and prayer and sex and grief and music, children, tv dinners, mixed recycling, newspapers and shopping malls and phones. The few times in my life I felt like I was going to die, and soon—from sadness, mostly, by my own sad hands—there was a peace, there. Rainfall landing on a burning zeppelin, slowly making its descent. I hope there’s peace like that for him, now, though in conversation with a friend just yesterday, I asked: Does anybody actually just love their father?
and I asked this without irony. Irony, like love, exists in every place between men and their fathers, even and especially inside our deepest wounds and holiest of grudges. Dad tells me he loves me all the time now, and this is a rain all by itself. It touches places that were dead within us, and they are made green again. The secret to good dirt is rot. What grows, grows best in close proximity to death. Each time I think of him—my father—something blooms.
Writer, multi-disciplinary artist, and faggotry hauntologist Sean Patrick Mulroy is an internationally recognized poet and award-winning professor, A 2013 Lambda Literary Fellow, 2018 Writer-in-Residence at The Kerouac Project in Orlando Florida, winner of the 2019 Margaret Reid Prize, and winner of the 2020 Button Poetry Chapbook Contest, Mulroy recently completed an international tour of Europe and SWANA in support of his debut poetry collection, Hated for the Gods (Button Poetry, 2023). His work has appeared in The Journal, Assaracus, The New York Times, Peach Fuzz Magazine, and Muzzle, among several other magazines and several anthologies of poetry. Born and raised in the American South, Sean has since lived and worked all over the world, in over 25 countries on 4 continents. At present, he lives in NYC.