The Walk
- Sep 16, 2020
- 2 min read
by Kelly McQuain
I put on my father’s shoes to take out the trash while he was passed out on the couch again.
And when I came in and saw him still there I kicked off his shoes and put on his feet
to walk awhile in them, and when his soles grew blistered from deserts carelessly tread I sloughed
my father’s skin to walk on bone, calcaneus and phalanges, cuboid and metatarsal. On and on
I walked, possessed, past shimmering oases and glimmering ships, and losses that could break
the most Herculean of hearts. I ground my father’s foot bones to dust, hoping to rise bird-hollow, as fleet
as a feather. And when I had burned through the last of his fire I closed my eyes to find
my father walking inside an ember, bringing me new feet
Kelly McQuain is the author of Velvet Rodeo, which was selected by poet C. Dale Young for the Bloom chapbook poetry prize. McQuain was born and raised in West Virginia but now calls Philadelphia home. His prose, poetry and illustrations have appeared in The Pinch, Painted Bride Quarterly, The Philadelphia Inquirer, Kestrel, and Cleaver, as well as such anthologies as Men on Men, Drawn to Marvel, LGBTQ Fiction and Poetry from Appalachia, Eyes Glowing at the Edge of the Woods: Fiction and Poetry from West Virginia, Best American Erotica, and Rabbit Ears: TV Poems. As a visual artist, McQuain has won prizes from the Barnes Foundation and the William Way LGBTQ Center, and his series of writer portraits appear as cover illustrations on Fjords Review. He has been a Sewanee Tennessee Williams Scholar and a Lambda Literary Fellow, and he has received two fellowships from the Pennsylvania Council on the Arts. He has served as a contributing editor to A&U Magazine and the Harrington Gay Men’s Fiction Quarterly. He has served as a volunteer selection committee member for the Free Library of Philadelphia’s One Book, One Philadelphia series for nearly a decade. As an English professor, he has received fellowships from the National Endowment for the Humanities and the East-West Center, and he has represented the U.S. from Beijing to Shanghai as a visiting scholar and guest of China’s Ministry of Education.
