Emily Bilman’s most recent poem to appear here was “The River Enigma” (February 2018). 

Father
By Emily Bilman

Frail with old age, my father’s fluid-filled feet
jutted out of his bed. Every evening, I washed
the copper vessel with a wooden dish-brush
that my husband thought was, with the wheel,
the best practical tool, and filled it with water
from the bathroom tap. Water, there, was
scarce like desert dearth. I brought the recipient
below his feet to dip them in coolness, then
dried them with a soft towel to apply the unction
to ease his oedema. As it covered the
blue-green hue of his feet, the salve tainted
them clay-white and he relaxed before I
bandaged his feet. One surreptitious morning,
he surprised me with a photo he always kept near
his heart. In her vintage puritan clothes, my grandmother
smiled at both of us from the time-worn photo,
frayed, partially, by my father’s perpetual gaze.