Hannah Silverstein
My Father Polishes His Silence
after Don Mee Choi’s “Ahn Hak-Sop #1”
He leaves it to my imagination what the farmhouse looks like now, what the peeling paint looks like, what my stepmother has planted in the garden this year, how bald the top of his head is, how thin he’s grown after all this time, how he splits wood with one crack of the axe, how brilliant the sunset behind Elmore Mountain, how many backroads it would take to travel there, how Centerville Brook feeds into the Lamoille, winding west to Lake Champlain, what a home I haven’t lived in for four decades looks like, if the mist rising from the pasture is fog or haze from the western wildfires, what he thinks of when he looks out over the mountain, what he meant when he said whenever you’re ready, the callouses on his thumbs from gripping the axe handle, whether a relationship can be repaired like an axe, whether a divided family is a family or not, what his voice sounds like, how we really chose this, how our flaws mirror each other’s, whether the old maple is still standing after the storm.
Hannah Silverstein
Hannah Silverstein is a graduate of the MFA Program for Writers at Warren Wilson College. A 2021 Best of the Net finalist, her poems have appeared or are forthcoming in Passages North, Barnstorm Journal, Dialogist, Orange Blossom Review, West Trestle Review, Cider Press Review, LEON Literary Review, Whale Road Review, and others. She lives in Vermont.