Here's a poem about my father in the Monterey Poetry Review's 2015 Spring edition:
The End of the Road Restaurant
My father once told me he felt like a six-piston engine
firing on only two. After L.A.’s poverty,
father dead, mother on welfare, he wanted to believe
his evangelical upbringing, but drifted
through a young dalliance with the preacher’s mad wife,
into the Navy, Korea, back to the bosom
of the Nazarene Church, finally marrying,
bringing his first child into the world.
What was a man to do, then, but raise a family,
go to seminary, become a minister himself
till they kicked him out for speaking in tongues
in the wrong denomination. Desperately,
then, become a junior high school teacher
in the most desolate town on Highway 99
till he couldn’t stand it, left
with his family, took us all to live
in a geodesic dome in the Sierras,
study metaphysics, torture a Japanese garden
from the hillside’s dusty clay. There was
little money, my mother still teaching,
his retirement sunk into dreams of building.
So his friend Jack let him cook
at the End of the Road miles from anywhere
frequented by faithful dreamers
and intrepid tourists. My sister
sang jazz, my mother waited tables,
and I, back from college
watched my father sweat at the stove
cooking steak, barbeque chicken,
finding stubborn joy late in life
over grilled onions, rinds of pepper—
the end of one road, another opening
in his eyes like sky.