One Minute With My Own Father

In between the end of his work day 
& the start of my nightshift
in my nightshirt uniform 
we stand in the kitchen while he spins
a grapefruit like a globe,
the spot it severed from the branch 
like the north pole dot—
he says his father was pushed 
into a locker by two of the
Maple Leaf all-time-greats,
pushed out of an elevated first floor 
window along with his study books,
became the principal of a remote
Northern Ontario elementary school
and built a running track for the kids
which is how the town remembers him—
he says his mother would get him
black cherry soda from the store
when they went together, barred him
from going to sweep the floor 
of the barbershop after the barber
shot two people in an attempted murder 
at the one apartment building in town,
and showed him how to pray the rosary—
he says his mother’s father came from
Kyiv in the ‘30s before shit hit the fan
but after a bunch of other shit had
already hit it, would pretend to not know 
English at the department store 
in an effort to get cheaper prices
through shared confusion, and would
encourage him to eat fruit in the market
to test it as a cover to quell hunger—
he says his youngest brother never
came out to play road hockey,
would sit inside with instruction manuals
for objects already built, took a pamphlet
from a lightpost at age fifteen that described 
some kind of underground militia and went 
to the remote wilderness with them but ended up 
a bus driver without them—he says he can’t recall 
what happened in between all of that, and when I say 
between which points he says he can’t recall, 
now standing at the sliding screen door 
with his cigarette ash hanging two centimeters beyond
the cigarette itself not ready to fall to the floor.