Cognitive Decline​

3rd Place in the Poetry Writing Contest

Issue 19

Our son saves his father’s businesses, negotiates with
banks and county tax authorities to spread out thousands
of dollars in unpaid years. He repairs neglected restrooms
 
in rental properties, attracts and signs tenants for rents—yes--
less than his father always demanded in combative bouts,
but his father’s tactics left empty stores, offices, left bills
 
unpaid, called down foreclosures on every property
acquired in his healthy years gone by, so when this
wonder son asked his dad to make him co-manager,
 
it was because dad made less and less sense, caused
ruptures with each worker he said he’d pay, shouted
and raised his fists, insisted they were out to cheat him,
 
but then, in a lucid moment, dad agreed. Our son took
the reins. Only, now, this father shouts to me, the mother,
that our son keeps him in the dark, steals from him,

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ALICE CAMPBELL ROMANO won 3rd Place of the Poetry Writing Contest. She is a published poet, print and on-line. Her first chapbook, The Consolation of Geometry won C&R Press Summer Tide Pool Prize, came out in Autumn, 2004. She’s lived in Italy where she translated film scripts from Italian to English but is settled at last in NYS with her Italian husband.

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READ THE FULL PIECE IN ISSUE 19