{"id":127,"date":"2011-01-09T10:21:15","date_gmt":"2011-01-09T10:21:15","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/ink.verticalplus.co.uk\/archive\/?p=127"},"modified":"2011-01-09T10:21:15","modified_gmt":"2011-01-09T10:21:15","slug":"chris-bays-is-by-a-river-with-no-shore","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/inksweatandtears.co.uk\/archive\/chris-bays-is-by-a-river-with-no-shore\/","title":{"rendered":"Chris Bays is by a river with no shore"},"content":{"rendered":"

A River with No Shore<\/span>


\u201cIt is time,\u201d mama says.  I hang up the phone, my mind a blur of regrets. Regret for losing my temper with him the last time I visited. Regret for not caring for him as mama and my brother had done. Regret for not living up to his high expectations.<\/span>

As I pack clothes into the backseat of my \u201886 Mercury, a car he helped find for me, I think about his house, socks lined up like soldiers, weekly duties printed all cap in black ink, dust vanquished from crevices, bed sheets pulled as tight as sheet metal.<\/span>

As I drive toward Portsmouth, past corn and wheat fields, past Chillicothe and tree-lined hills, in my car windows ocher and umber blurring with gray, I hear him next to me, \u201cSlow the fuck down.\u201d And he\u2019s trying, once again, to teach me to drive, as I shift gears, and the Ohio River rises with <\/span>

his voice, and he\u2019s telling of crossing this river as a boy, him in the tunnel next to me, wallowing in the dark, him in his rocker, beer cans lined up on the floor, circles of smoke near his face, journeying out of the hollers of Kentucky, out of Vietnam.<\/span>

\u201cHe spit up chunks that looked like lung,\u201d I hear my brother telling me months before. Mama greets me at the door. \u201cHe asked for you,\u201d she says. I hear gurgling, rasping, before entering the room. Papa is bald, thinner, his veins translucent blue. I touch his hand. He sighs and is gone.<\/span>



* Chris Bays<\/span> is an assistant professor of English at Clark State in Springfield, Ohio. Prior to teaching, he was a business owner and world traveler, having lived in Germany and Turkey and visited most of Europe and parts of China. He says of this piece “It began as a haibun but became something else, crossing boundaries between prose and poetry, blending genres like some work I found on your ezine.”<\/span>

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A River with No Shore\u201cIt is time,\u201d mama says.  I hang up the phone, my mind a blur of regrets. Regret for losing my temper with him the last time I visited. Regret for not caring for him as mama and my brother had done. Regret for not living up to his high expectations.As I […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_et_pb_use_builder":"","_et_pb_old_content":"","_et_gb_content_width":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[7],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-127","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-prose-poetry"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/inksweatandtears.co.uk\/archive\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/127","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/inksweatandtears.co.uk\/archive\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/inksweatandtears.co.uk\/archive\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/inksweatandtears.co.uk\/archive\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/inksweatandtears.co.uk\/archive\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=127"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/inksweatandtears.co.uk\/archive\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/127\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/inksweatandtears.co.uk\/archive\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=127"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/inksweatandtears.co.uk\/archive\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=127"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/inksweatandtears.co.uk\/archive\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=127"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}