Katherine Fallon

Early Adopter

On a few occasions, I caught Dad
in the yard with a sledgehammer

or a drill, a saw or a hatchet—
tools he never employed otherwise,

tools I didn’t even know he owned—
going after a keyboard that no longer

cared what he wanted, or a bottlefly
green motherboard that had become

a minute silenced city. He had plenty
of material. Each thing he brought home

would inevitably fail or be replaced
by progress. I saw him sweating,

at war. I dodged shrapnel, watched it
glitter in an arc across the sun.

________________________________________________________________________________________

Katherine Fallon is the author of The Toothmaker's Daughters (Finishing Line Press, 2018). Her poems have appeared in AGNI, Colorado Review, Juked, Meridian, Foundry and Best New Poets 2019, among others. She has been nominated for Best of the Net and the Pushcart Prize. She shares domestic space with two cats and her favorite human, who helps her zip her dresses.