Poems I Probably Won’t Write About My Stepfather by Jennifer Stewart Miller

Poems I Probably Won’t Write About My Stepfather

by Jennifer Stewart Miller

(published in Crab Creek Review, March 25, 2021)

On Holding the Phone to Your Ear the Night Before You Die

So Your Half-Sister Can Read You a Poem

On Missing Your Last Breath Because I Had to Stop for Gas

Poem in Which My Mother Reminisces with the Funeral Director

About Meeting Him When He Was a Little Kid

How to Choose the Right Locally Sourced Wooden Urn

for a Former Forester

On First Walking into the Forbidden Sanctum of

Your Office, AKA, the Junk Room

On Reading Letters in Which You Pour Your Heart Out

to Your Estranged Boys

Poem in Which I Hide the Scissored Pictures of Sexy Women

from My Mother

On Boxing Up Your Boy Scout Badges and the Many Clippings

Extolling Achievements I Wish I’d Known About

On Finding a Heartbroken Letter from Your 2nd Wife

Your Two Youngest Boys Were Gorgeous Toddlers

and I’m Sad for All of Us

Thinking About Who Might Want Your Guns

What to Do with All the Cowboy Hats

On Shipping You to Your Children by First Class Mail

Wondering Why You Never Let My Mother

Drive Your Pickup Truck

I love a list poem! I love a poem that starts with a negative! I love poems that are clever and go beyond their own cleverness to be a deeply emotional and moving poem! And look what happens in this poem by Jennifer Stewart Miller--all of these things! (And shout out to Crab Creek Review, which so often has amazing poems that make me wish I had written them.)

On the one hand, this is a poem about grief. But it is also a look into 2 people--the speaker and her step-father--and their relationship, all the while making us really see the step-father. And like the speaker, we get to know him from this poem, but we are still left with questions.

The first 5 stanzas tell us a bit about the speaker, the stepfather, and the mother, and they are all things that anyone who has dealt with the death of a loved one will relate to. Maybe someone's half-sister did not read them a poem the night before they died, but chances are you remember something of the night before. Or the morning of. Items 2, 3, and 4 are even more mundane--getting gas, chatting with someone not seen in years, and choosing an urn. Okay, that last one is not too mundane, but I love the way the poet makes it specific enough to give us insight into the step-father. Also, choosing an urn for a former anything--forester, high school teacher, opera singer, etc.--does make this act a little more everyday; the urn becomes less important than the career of the deceased, which is really true, yes? A person's life is more important than the urn their cremated remains end up in.

These 4 list items are not only, for me, the most heartbreaking, but the fact that they appear in this order adds to their power.

On Reading Letters in Which You Pour Your Heart Out

      to Your Estranged Boys

Poem in Which I Hide the Scissored Pictures of Sexy Women

     from My Mother

On Boxing Up Your Boy Scout Badges and the Many Clippings

      Extolling Achievements I Wish I’d Known About

On Finding a Heartbroken Letter from Your 2nd Wife

The first item is incredibly sad, of course. Immediately after we learn of the boys from a previous relationship, we get a bit of an "ick"--the stepfather has cut out pictures of "sexy women" from magazines and the stepdaughter hides them from her mother. Or are these pictures ones that the speaker has cut out and kept? If they are the speaker's, we get a little more sadness, and another example of a strained parent-child relationship.

The third item here is one that so many of us can relate to--we find out things about someone that we did not know about when they were in our lives and can now now discuss with them, ask them about, congratulate them on, etc. And no matter how much you tell someone things, or they tell you, once they are gone you will most likely discover some gaps that can never be filled.

The fourth item is another bit of the stepfather's past, a little more insight into his being. Not only is the speaker's mother wife #3 (at least), but wife #2, at some point, was devastated by the divorce.

The guns and cowboy hats, along with the Boy Scouts awards, gives us enough of a visual to fill out the rest--I admit I am picturing a Sam Elliott type.

The penultimate list item is one of those things one does after a death that is both bizarre and mundane. It provides a nice way in to the last list item, for which the speaker has no answer and will never get an answer, and we are now with her in that we wonder as well.

Jennifer Stewart Miller has a website which includes links to many of her other published poems. You can also learn more about her and her writing on the site. Click here.