robert

she told me my father was a bipolar alcoholic.

i inherited his Italian, his short, his thick

hair in unwanted places. and i was born with bourbon

in my blood, my brain a scrambled circuit-board,

porous as the paper birth certificates are printed on.

my mother has no photos— there should be

no need since i look just like her, except my eyes

are glazed over, the way one is hazy at the tail-end of many margaritas.

and i don’t drink margaritas, but after searching, fruitless, for

my father’s form, i tried to get closer to him; i spilled

into a highball glass, became a pond of purple, grape

vodka and bruises that still won’t vanish.

the night he met my mother

was the night i was conceived; she never told me where

but i can’t help but picture the bed i woke up in after blacking out

from following my father into the bottom of a stranger’s flask,

my eyes opening to an unfamiliar ceiling,

wondering if i finally found my way to seeing daddy.

“i've always had a fascination with my birthfather, since all i really know about him is his name, he's short and italian, and was an alcoholic and possibly bipolar as well. i've developed this sort of mythology around him, the way i did with my birthmother before i met her. being adopted is really hard, and most of my emotional issues regarding adoption don't have much to do with robert, but sometimes writing about the mystery of what is possible is more interesting than writing the reality i ended up finding.”

alyssa hanna's poems have appeared in Reed Magazine, The Mid-American Review, The Naugatuck River Review, Rust + Moth, Pidgeonholes, and others. She was nominated for a Pushcart Prize, a finalist in the 2017 James Wright Poetry Competition, and a semi-finalist for The Hellebore scholarship. alyssa is a Contributing Editor at Barren Magazine and an aquarium technician in Westchester, living with her four weird lizards. follow her @alyssawaking on twitter, instagram, ko-fi, tumblr, and patreon.