FATHERHOOD

Immediately, you gain 50 pounds
and give up on sleep
while the world dulls except
in the presence of your children.
Your love of foreign films dies
without speaking a word of French
and you don’t trust anyone
who knows anything about music.
An affair now looks less like a chance
to get laid and more like an opportunity
to fail another person
you won’t ever understand.
Nonetheless, beauty appears
in unimaginable ways—
the sun shining on a lake
after a random duck attack
and your wife, days after demanding a divorce
says “You’re such a good father”
and so it is that you learn to love TV
and forgive yourself vacations you can’t afford
and your drinking triples
but in a good way
and your daughter is up to the plate
with a softball bat on her shoulder
and a helmet that doesn’t quite fit
and you wish for her the moon
and as much gravity as she needs
and your son draws a comic
of the two of you digging treasure
on some imagined island

and you pray he gets there
and finds gold
and your heart grows
to an unimaginable size
until, finally, it explodes.

Dave Newman, a recent Pushcart winner for fiction, is the author of eleven books, including Dope and Vodka and Cigarettes, and Not Shaving Her Legs (Roadside Press, 2026), Better Than the Best American Poetry (Roadside Press, 2025), and the story collection She Throws Herself Forward to Stop the Fall (Roadside Press, 2024). His collection The Slaughterhouse Poems (White Gorilla Press, 2013) was named one of the best books of the year by L Magazine. He was a finalist for the Rattle Poetry Prize and won their Readers’ Choice Award in 2024. His poems, essays, and stories have appeared in magazines and journals around the world, including Ambit (U.K.), Tears In The Fence (U.K.), Gulf Stream, New World Writing, Belt, Misfit, TPQ, and the legendary Nerve Cowboy. He appeared in the PBS documentary narrated by Rick Sebak about Pittsburgh writers. Newman lives in Trafford, PA, the last town in the Electric Valley, with his wife, the writer Lori Jakiela. After a decade of working in medical research, he currently teaches in the Creative and Professional Writing Program at The University of Pittsburgh-Greensburg, his alma mater.