When My Father Stood Up In A County Courtroom, Looked A Jury Of His Friends In The Eye

I am done shrinking to fit what they can tolerate.

At the next light, I glance at the briefcase on the passenger seat. The velvet box with the phoenix pin rests inside it. Small. Unassuming. Cold metal shaped like rebirth. We use symbols in my line of work because sometimes a symbol is the only public thing you’re allowed to keep.

When the light changes, I drive into it.

For fifteen years I was a ghost in their bank accounts, a ghost in their narratives, a ghost in a house where my portrait could be replaced by a tractor calendar and they thought that meant I had vanished.

But ghosts are only powerless in stories told by people who do not understand what haunts them.

I do now.

And as the road carries me toward Langley and the morning opens clean and hard ahead of me, I realize I am no longer a ghost in my own story.

I am the author.

And at last, finally, unmistakably, I am seen.