How it’s written in code—the large square  
hands that need to grasp, haul
and hammer—replicated like the bunion spur
for who knows how many generations.
I watch him draft a master list:
80-pound bags of concrete,
decking, balusters...how like my father,
who would craft our home from a three-room
cabin.  Bereft of muscular sons, he once
chided me for lifting a cinder block, the only
one of three daughters destined to stow
a toolbox in the trunk of her car.  Comes
a grandson, college notwithstanding, who devolves
on whatever he can build or install: from lasers
crowning the world’s tallest flagpole
in Jordan, theme parks in Singapore and Seoul,
to arcing fountains above Shanghai’s Huangpu.
Not a consequence of his brush with Biology,
this genetic imperative, though in some arcane
guise the paradigms exist.  Like lunar tides
sluicing through familial blood, they persist.

Linda M. Fischer, a merit award winner in Atlanta Review’s Poetry International Competition in both 2013 and 2015, has poems published or forthcoming in Ibbetson Street, Iodine Poetry Journal, Josephine Quarterly, Muddy River Poetry Review, Poetry Porch, Potomac Review, Schuylkill Valley Journal, Valparaiso Poetry Review, Verse-Virtual, and elsewhere.  Twice a Pushcart Prize nominee, she has published two chapbooks Raccoon Afternoons and Glory (Finishing Line Press). For a look at these and more poems: lindamfischer.com

Check out our interview with Linda M. Fischer here.