Sonnet for My Father

“Fickle dancer of mine pumped up my thighs

with helium,” I say. Helium, strange

word to use for love, but it can disguise

my June heartbreak, and maybe rearrange

Dad’s stuck memories of his paradise,

since it's been twenty years she's been gone,

and the threat of selfish tears in his eyes

embarrasses him - so he blinks and yawns.

Ancestral memories tumble me back

to wink at his still-radiant young queen.

My half-formed self, couched in the living sac

she carried, could it ever have foreseen

one lover weeping as the other sealed

her heart, fate spinning us on the same wheel?