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    Last Visit
    Last Visit
    Last Visit
    Ebook67 pages26 minutes

    Last Visit

    By Chad Abushanab

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    About this ebook

    In Chad Abushanab’s debut poetry collection, The Last Visit, he carefully and compassionately explores a family broken by alcoholism and abuse. These poems trace the trajectory of an adolescent living with a violent father struggling with addiction, and recount both the abused child’s perspective and his attempts to reckon with his past as he reaches adulthood, chronicling his own struggles with substance abuse and the reverberations of trauma in his life. Amid the violence and hurt, Abushanab’s verse renders moments of compassion—even the least sympathetic figures are shown to be grappling with their flaws, and the narrator struggles to find compassion and move beyond the memories and habits that haunt him. These well-crafted poems explore how the past shapes us and how difficult it can be to leave behind.
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherAutumn House Press
    Release dateMar 15, 2019
    ISBN9781938769818
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      Book preview

      Last Visit - Chad Abushanab

      Negatives under Microscope

      I’m focused on the space inside your eyes—

      first pupil, then iris, now cellular disruption—

      in search of some clear catalyst, some reason

      for these scars, for this crooked helix on my chest.

      I want the DNA for empty bottles.

      I need to know what made your cruelties grow

      unwieldy, like cancers let loose upon a body.

      I’ve scoured the entire frame, pushed past

      the edge of every family negative

      believing the secret’s hidden, like a code

      between the plastic and the acetate.

      I stare for hours at a single portrait,

      deducing from a smile the hell behind your face.

      At times I think I smell the whisky sweet

      perfume of you, as though each image captured

      something of how you lived, how you breathed.

      But then each clue turns out a part of me:

      a hair, a thumbprint left while leafing through

      the pile of specimens, a flake of skin,

      a barely visible scratch I made in haste—

      more me than you, more you than science,

      naked and pinned down beneath the lens,

      as though our cause is finally in the frame,

      begging for exposure, for the light.

      The Factory

      Hulks in shadows just outside of town:

      a rusted mess, a postindustrial tomb.

      Poorwills roost in smokestacks falling down

      and cry out something awful in the gloom.

      Elsewhere, men with bloody lungs keep

      coughing up clots like overripe berries.

      Their wives beside them pretend to be asleep,

      imagine different endings to their stories.

      Plastic Men

      After each fight, Mom took us both

      to Wilson’s Five & Dime to pick

      some cheap toys. Our father’s slurred voice

      became a ghost of breath beneath

      the long tin ventilation shafts.

      Mom waited by the counter,

      spoke to the clerk about discontinued

      spools of thread, buttons she’d meant

      to sew on weeks ago. She wore

      green bruises below her eyes.

      Her split lip kept her dabbing blood

      with Kleenex—a poppy flowered rag.

      Digging through crates of army men,

      we looked for figures of tragedy:

      missing arms, hands broken at the wrist,

      the grenadier who’d gripped the bomb

      too long. Back home, we’d line up the

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