I have never dined out with my father

Not once. Not just the two of us.
Not even a trip to a greasy spoon,
a chat over coffee and a slice of cake.
And so this is novel, him nearing eighty,
me approaching fifty, our first Sunday lunch,
sophisticated talk, gone is our usual banter.
We play at adults, peruse the menu,
shake napkins loose, smooth them across
our laps. We order a bottle because
it seems the thing to do. House red, dad?
Yes, why not. That goes with beef, right?
Only, we’re on a table for three,
too much temptation for the both of us,
discussion turning to what my mum
would eat if she were here. Turkey?
No, she’d have the fish, dad. The salmon.
How odd, we muse, that she’s not just
nipped to the ladies, that she’s in hospital,
a spiky temperature keeping her there
for one more night. My dad snookers his peas
around his plate, punctures his Yorkshire,
says he’s too full, can’t finish. But I know
this is how he falls apart, this momentary pause,
this break in the action. It’s like the scene
in Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade,
Harrison Ford and Sean Connery on board
a zeppelin, trying to find common ground
over a tumbler of whiskey. Wasn’t Connery
only twelve years older than Ford? Yes, dad,
not much between them. I think about the almost
thirty years between us, the leftovers,
the vase of plastic flowers, the bill, the table,
his mobile, messages pinging from my mum.
He studies them like his very own Grail Diary,
like they’ll guide us through the challenges ahead.
She’s comfortable. She’s having chicken soup.
You finished? Come on, we’ve got work to do.
He’s right, of course, time to return to our quest,
the restaurant now ballooned to an airship,
sailing somewhere above the Derwent.

Jeanette Burton is a poet from Belper in Derbyshire. Her poetry has previously appeared in Mslexia, Poetry Wales, The North, The Friday Poem, Dust, Atrium, IS&T and Dreich. She has been placed in several competitions, winning first prize in McLellan (2021), Ware (2022) and Poets, Prattlers and Pandemonialists (2023). Her debut pamphlet, Ostriches: Ten Poems about My Dad, is published by Candlestick Press