David B. Prather
Shouting at an Empty House
by David B. Prather
ISBN: 979-8-9873058-8-1
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David B. Prather’s first collection, We Were Birds, was published by Main Street Rag Publishing in 2019. Bending Light with Bare Hands is now available from Fernwood Press. He is a past president of West Virginia Writers, Inc., a statewide non-profit organization. He taught English Composition, American Literature, and Creative Writing at West Virginia University at Parkersburg and English Comp at Marietta College in Marietta, Ohio. He also served as poetry editor for Confluence Literary Journal and for Tantra Press, and he hosted the Blennerhassett Reading Series. He currently serves as a reader for Suburbia Journal. His poetry, essays, and reviews have appeared in many journals, including Colorado Review, Seneca Review, Prairie Schooner, The American Journal of Poetry, The Literary Review, Poet Lore, and others. His work has also appeared in many anthologies, including Voices From the Fierce Intangible World (from South Florida Poetry Journal) and Endlessly Rocking: Poems in Honor of Walt Whitman’s 200th Birthday (Unbound Content, Englewood, NJ). He studied acting at the National Shakespeare Conservatory in New York, and he appeared in a couple of local (West Virginia/Ohio) independent movies. He received his MFA from Warren Wilson College in North Carolina. And he lives in the town where he was born (Parkersburg, West Virginia), where he was recently inducted into the West Virginia Literary Hall of Recognition.
The Boy
My inner child is a phoenix
burnished by bicycle and BB gun,
singed by slingshot and slinky.
He’s an old soul, so I’ve been told,
ready to rekindle his wings
and conflagrate, then resurrect
from bone cinders and body ashes.
He flicks light switches
with his fingers/my fingers—on/off,
on/off—waits for his father/my father,
to warn against wasting electricity.
Because the child I was remembers the 70s
as energy-crisis-Willy-Wonka-Star-Wars.
Those days are moldering embers.
The past is acrid and pungent. It clings
to old sweaters and lingers in my hair.
I’ve been told that men never grow up.
I saw my grandfather become
juvenile, which my grandmother called
his second childhood.
Dementia is tricky that way.
I remember when he was dying
my grandmother said he’d be reborn
in Heaven. I thought she meant
he’d be a blue-eyed-boy again
playing jacks and kick-the-can,
and he’d splash through the creek
scaring minnows, crawdads,
and bugs that walked on water
like saviors.
