Picked Me a Plum by Ben Rader

THE lady at the door takes one look at Cal and puffs out her body like a blowfish. She’s got on white leather pants; an earth colored blouse and a buttery scarf around her neck—over all of that is a royal blue robe, flowing, with little lines of white dashing down the front. As her body inflates, grows wider and wider, the little white lines grow into big, fat exclamation points without the points.
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What was
on only disturbed me more than the
static
White, black and grey static-muffled murmurs
The faces I saw that screamed in ALLCAPs
While a ghost pulled puppet strings

At first light the sun plays with us in a once veiled sky with luminous
sea birds swallowing glances from the green waters,
along feathered winds sweeping the white sand
to uncover shadowy roses for our vase rescued from war

we kiss in the middle of a bird storm

i feel like the heaviest whale pressed into the surface of a colorless frozen lake which our big wet bodies splinter like bones

i shake branches out of your sheets and write inside your mouth about ghosts snapchatting each other pictures of a bird mummuration

sparrows eating fast-food salads with their plastic forks

My daughter, Sally, calls me Daddy. She's twenty-six years old and still calls me Daddy. I do not encourage it; I do not egg her on by buying those necklaces or bracelets that say Daddy’s Little Girl. I know it's nothing I should let bother me but I can't help it: she's a grown woman. Living in her own apartment with a boyfriend; a solid job—a dog. She has a dog. I suppose I never thought about this sort of thing before I had a daughter. I'd hear adult women, whether in real life, or on television, call their fathers Daddy. But it never bothered me like it does when my own daughter does it. My wife, Lindsey,—her own father died when she was still young—she says it's hard for her to say whether she wouldn't have still been calling him Daddy well into her adult years. But then, she's just trying to make me feel better while also not betraying, in some subtle, weird way, her daughter. To tease me Lindsey'll sometimes say “Hi, Daddy” when she answers my calls. No, I don't think it's some terrible quirk to feel strange when your adult daughter is still calling you Daddy when you've told her, how “You feel strange when she does it,” and, also, “Could she please stop?” The terrible thing would be to tell her how loathsome it is to me. I have a dream where my daughter is very little; little as a doll, her face a small white thing in my hands. And she’s speaking gibberish, like she’s reading a machine manual; it’s very robotic; I feel scared and confused. I have another where she's fallen, skinned her knee and come into the house, bleeding across the kitchen floor, her bare feet not making a sound, saying, “Fix me, fucker.” And last night I dreamed she was calling her boyfriend Daddy. She was at the window, telling him to come look, come look. And when he came, it was me: he was me. And in the dream my daughter was just standing there, her thin arms stretched out, into what seemed like infinity, reaching for me, going: “I love you, Daddy. I love you.”