After Dad Leaves for Alaska
I don’t call the landline, over and over, to listen to his voice on the answering machine. A package arrives wrapped in brown paper and twine. Inside there’s a glass jar with three dark, shriveled toes. A note in Dad’s chicken scratch: No feeding or watering needed. Don’t put them in the sun. He left to make his fortune leading caribou expeditions. Dad never took me hunting, we just drove those thirty miles into town for a bucket of chicken from KFC and a 2-liter bottle of Diet Coke. At night the toes rattle. What are they trying to say? Dad needs money for a dentist to fix his once perfect teeth after testing for gold? A new coat? Did he wake up in a blizzard, frostbitten, with wolves gnawing on his feet? Did he shoo them away—finish the job himself? I can do this, Dad, I can get it right. I poke holes in the lid of the jar and hold it up to my ear. If I listen closely, I can almost hear them say they’re proud of me.
Stagnant Water
Our neighbor failed to uphold the handshake deals after Dad died. Irrigation ditch clogged, washed out roads, the fields uncut, stalks falling over the weight of themselves. The farm fell like the old black wings of a turkey vulture. After winter, the seal around the underground pump house rotted away. I heaved the lid into the weeds. Little upturned ships floated in the dirty water: spiders curled like hands, the stillest rattlesnake I’d ever seen. It became my job to call the power company, to clear out the kills with a long stick. When I was a boy, I was gifted a fishtank I didn’t know how to care for. Algae crept up the glass, stained the plastic barn the fish hid in. I poured too much feed that sparkled like pennies. I found their bellies breaking the air, pressed them under with my thumb, but they bobbed back up.
Daniel Lurie is a Jewish, rural writer, from eastern Montana. He holds an MFA in Poetry from the University of Idaho. Daniel is co-editor of Outskirts Literary Journal and a Poetry Reader for Chestnut Review. His work has appeared or is forthcoming in Gulf Coast, Pleiades, North American Review, Sonora Review, and others. He was recently long-listed for Palette Poetry’s Micro Chapbook Prize, and awarded a 2025-2026 Wisconsin Institute for Creative Writing Fellowship from the University of Wisconsin-Madison. Find him at danielluriepoetry.com