Confessions
wet stalks of wheat lean against mottled burgundy paint: a dappled barn, batten winking with each shift of cloud. rain-filled gutters rupture like stretched bladders and the barn soaks. like Patricius and Augustine my father and I walk together between forms brown and wet and we watch the backhoe raze the barn down and so goes what happened inside. Walls have memory: smoke colors apple-print wallpaper, sheetrock scars from nails, screws, hooks. walls level the wheat, nodded heads flatten like stalks pressed beneath boots. kernels flutter, then fall. rain obscures my father’s face. he could be somebody else or nobody at all and I wonder about the bodies of saints.
--Nick Ripatrazone
Nick Ripatrazone lives with his wife in New Jersey. His recent work has appeared or is forthcoming in The Kenyon Review, The Saint Ann’s Review, Sou’wester, The Los Angeles Review, and The New York Quarterly. A staff writer for Luna Park Review, he is pursuing an MFA from Rutgers University.
