Your Father Tells You His Dysthymia Is Over At 72
genetic, but who isn’t just a little very depressed
during some tusk of high school? it is not astonishing.
his life, by far, more difficult than yours. genetic, and
you wish you could meet the horse
his brother clotheslined him on
by running the animal
and ducking suddenly under
so much white cloth:
bone gush of ghost/ saint/ bleached nightdress
cawing in the dewed air. the imagined red line
coming to your father’s neck
before the wire even met it. script.
him in the grass in Michigan in his teens, listening
to the agoraphobic thunder
of his brother riding off alone.
what,
only
fifty-eight more years or so then
his brain will just, like morning,
sift down into itself and sit.
he reports over the phone to you
that losing his regular depression was like
someone came in out of nowhere to change the sheets:
yes, it was here,
yes, it’s gone now.
the launderer goes so unnamed
that it feels violent.
a snow-thunderstorm. rare and housebreaking.
no, there isn’t any helping. genetic, you
listen. a horse can really
only live till 30.
Claire Oleson is a queer writer and 2020 Fiction Fellow at the Center for Fiction. She is an Assistant Editor at the Kenyon Review and an incoming MFA candidate in fiction at NYU. Her work has been published by Joyland, the LA Review of Books, Foglifter, and Brink, among other journals. She is currently working on a novel that treads the space between luxury and survival in contemporary homesteading practices. She is represented by Eloy Bleifuss at Neon Literary. Claire can be found puttering about online at www.claire-oleson.com.