Answering my father
You stopped the car in the lane just before our driveway.
I didn’t ask why. Chestnut trees leaned in on either side,
the damp air breathed. You sat there, looking straight ahead
and said there’s nothing worse than being queer.
Such a strange word from your mouth, a word
that said you’d tasted it in your mouth before:
your frozen face, something flat and final in your voice
like a blade coming down on a neck.
I sat paralysed. The moment ended there.
You’re thirty-five years dead and I’m still waiting
for an answer to rise in my throat,
knowing now what I didn’t know then,
that you’d loved a man who loved you,
how you cut it dead –
how you saw it in me,
wanted me to kill it too.
Sue Proffitt lives in Hallsands, South Devon, is a Hawthornden Fellow and has been published in a number of magazines, anthologies and poetry competitions. She has two poetry collections: Open After Dark (Oversteps, 2017) and The Lock-Picker (Palewell Press, 2021), and is currently working on her third collection.