My father doesn’t know it’s Christmas

He marvels at the olives I brought, the butterbrezeln.
Upon my arrival, the nurse who looks like Beyoncé
does a little dance with me:
he has slept two nights in a row, no need to restrain him.
One more and he can go home.

This is our nativity scene:
the wise boy, the stressed woman, the old man
losing his mind.

(the man on the other bed, surrounded by tissues, dabbing and dabbing.
my father’s rant at the nurses’ imagined receival of a lorry filled with alcohol.
the carer my dad calls an asshole because of this.)

The bleak corridor is filled with tinsel and faint fairy lights. I am not sad anymore.

The year before, he sent me a Christmas present, then the letters became fewer and fewer,
words escaping the straight lines, going over, going under,
like him.

Annick Yerem is a German/Scottish poet and the EIC of Sídhe Press. Her book St.Eisenberg and the Sunshine Bus was published by Hedgehog Press in 2022. She is happy to have had words published in The Storms, Anti-Heroin Chic, Feral, The Dirigible Ballon, and iamb, among other places.