» Poetry

A MOMENT OF TENDERNESS

Vincent Antonio Rendoni

 

I witnessed something beautiful, friends

One day,

on my father’s monthly visit
to give his father
some money

Abuelo,

who kicked him out at sixteen
who didn’t believe in touch or mercy

caught his son limping

& put away the contempt fathers have for sons
& suspended the law of machismo reached for the rusted Texaco box
with the antiseptic, tweezers & gauze
slapped his knee
& called to his son’s feet,
& began working his way
through the skin & blood
of a used car salesman’s ingrown toenail

& never thought, not even once

as he cut through the keratin
cleaning & washing the lowest part
of working folk
that this is something
a man has to think about.

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Vincent Antonio Rendoni

Vincent Antonio Rendoni is the author of A Grito Contest in the Afterlife, winner of the 2022 Catamaran Poetry Prize for West Coast Poets selected by Dorianne Laux. His work has appeared or is forthcoming in Prairie Schooner, AGNI, Pleiades, Ninth Letter, Alaska Quarterly Review, The Sycamore Review, The Vestal Review, Another Chicago Magazine, and So It Goes: The Literary Journal of the Kurt Vonnegut Museum and Library. He has been nominated for the Pushcart Prize, Best of the Net, and Best Small Fictions. He lives in White Center, WA.