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The Seed
I slam my bedroom door, drop the needle on
Led Zeppelin III
and turn the volume knob all the way. That’ll show him.
But my father’s gone: already traveling back to Venezuela,
back to his childhood home, to the old bedroom. Arriving,
he finds the radio still there, dusty glass tubes glowing
in its back. He slams his own bedroom door and tunes
until he gets an American station—Motown, The Four Tops.
A ha!, he says, Toma esto! But his father, dead and buried,
now begins knocking as loudly as possible the right side
of the wooden coffin, a tango rhythm he remembers perfectly,
insistent, bright—and so on toward the beginning.
Music guides the patriarchal line of my family, music
the source of its fruitful destruction. What else can we do?
We are not kings.
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Peter’s poetry appears
in Verse, Poet Lore, The Chattahoochee Review, and
Slipstream. In 2000, he was nominated for a Pushcart
Prize. His manuscript Short Waves won the 2002 White
Eagle Coffee Store Press Chapbook Award. Watching
Late-Night Hitchcock & Other Poems, his other collection
of poetry, was published in Winter 2004 by Handwritten
Press. Ramos, who holds graduate degrees in writing and
English literature from George Mason University and the
State University of New York, currently teaches creative
writing as a visiting professor at Grand Valley State
University. He and his wife, Diane, live in Hudsonville,
Michigan.
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