My family moved west to a city where ordinary people turned into stars on the street; at Grauman’s Chinese, we fit our feet into their feet. We settled in a house on a hill—at the top a view of the Hollywood sign. My father walked the dog up the hill every night to watch the stars align. His: a promised promotion to VP. No one expected his stroke our first year. I’d just turned thirteen. He moved from his bed to a chair when we kids were permitted a visit, exposed under his hospital gown, the first penis I’d seen. After my father came back from the hospital, I couldn’t bring myself to sit on his lap again, where that small mammal could stir. My mother and his boss were certain a promotion would do him in, so he remained stuck in the corporate hierarchy, like sediment compressed into rock, his identity formed by erosion.
Published in Cider Press Review, Volume 26, Issue 6.
Candice Reffe’s book of poems Live from the Mood Board, an insider’s view of the fashion world and corporate power, won Elixir Press’s Antivenom Poetry Award and was published in 2019. Twice a fellow at the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown and a Mass Cultural Council Artist fellow, Candice’s poems have appeared in Denver Quarterly, Harvard Review, Hotel Amerika, Ploughshares, Poetry Daily, Witness and elsewhere. She lives in Northampton, MA.
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