Peter Upham lives in North Carolina with his three children. He is an administrator at Asheville School. His poems have recently appeared in Notre Dame Review, Atlanta Review, Borderlands, and the Anglican Theological Review.

ns 69 | Fall/Winter 2007

Featuring an interview with MH Abrams, reviews of new books by Walter Benn Michaels, John McGowan, and Paul Smith, plus a special section on online criticism.

Read this Issue

Published Spring 2006

To the Patricide Entreating the Parole Board

by Peter Upham | ns 65-66

Nine, drunk, beside your dad, you swung
A gill-torn bream on a pink line, while he
Pulled the dinghy onto the shell beach—
A white and gray undercast, sharp.

By twelve, mom's tremble had spread extremity
To extremity: she blurred like a mis-thread film.
The black crescent at her eye ink-stamped
A fading pattern across your field of sight.

Dad's key ring had five keys—house, shed, car,
Cabinet one, cabinet two. You had used them all by fourteen:
A midnight glint and roar through the Atchafalaya,
Buick fast and arcing as a meteor.

Dad was a prophet of obedience in the
Strange land of his own house.
He pointed guns, as if by example the barrels
Could torque a bent son straight.

                   Under pecan trees,
You huffed gas to share that twittering peace of birds,
Until he found you once, and tapping a cigarette against his gapped
                                                                                                       smirk,
Exploded you. Your patchy moustache burned like grass.
The fumes and fury you can still recall. Your face became half-face, half-
                                                                                                       hide.

Eighteen, the two of you smashed again, the quarrel this time
About the relative ineptness of two local boxers:
Dad in his stiff plaid shirt, collar unraveling, wet looseness to his eyes,
A hard drunk's steel. But you would not burn again.

You knew the key, the cabinet, the placement of the thumb and pointer.
You knew the concealed hope for love and extolling.
You knew what means symmetry, what means power.
By the temperate waters of a marsh, you knew. And shot.

What you don't know, what you don't remember,
Is everything they want to know. What happened next.
What happened first. The syllogisms of hate.
As if gravity were a sequence. As if life were the line and not the fish.

MR BOOKS

Critics at Work
ed. Jeffrey J. Williams.

Critics at Work offers a guided tour through the central, sometimes confusing and frequently controversial developments in contemporary literary and cultural criticism. The tour guides, however, are not distant observers but have been primary participants in those developments, and they report on theory, cultural studies, the literary canon, the recent focus on race, sexuality, and other identities, the state of the univerisity, and the role of the intellectual. Throughout, they consider the not always easy negotiation of politics and culture.

Purchase Critics at Work.