Liz Dolan

A HALF A BLOCK BEHIND HIM

the father shadows his autistic son
now twenty, his head down, shoulders hunched.

T. J. pushes through the summer
crowds like the crest of a wave

listens to the flat slap of his sandal.
The latitude of the ten thousand and two boards

and the longitude of the shiny nails
mark knots in the piney wood swirling like islands

and bodies of water on the map hanging in his room
where he goes and locks the door behind him

pulls the sheet over his head, the canopy
of the rain forest he journeys to alone

in Rarotonga. A clear lagoon fringes its shore,
tints of trevally populate coral heads

and if he lived there even he would dance the Huri.
A small red sail flaps at his neck,

a tag on the back of his tee shirt.

Liz Dolan, a four time Pushcart nominee, has won a 2009 fellowship as an established professional from the Delaware Division of the Arts. In addition, her first poetry manuscript was nominated for the Robert McGovern prize, Ashland University. She has also been published in On the Mason Dixon Line, An Anthology of Contemporary Delaware Writers,University of Delaware, 2008.