all my life, oh lord

      after Sommer Browning

My father wants to know if we’re “pay pals.”

My father calls me on his birthday and says, “It’s my birthday.”

My father keeps a shoebox of greeting cards in his closet, pre-signed and “ready for anything.”

My father tells my fiancé he’ll stop sending me Valentine’s Day cards if it, you know, means anything to him.

A woman’s father might be the first man she loves.

My father invites one hundred and seven people to my wedding.

“I don’t want to hear about that roleplaying shit,” my father says to me when I try to talk to him about gender roles.

The brown lasiked eyes of my father fill with awe as “everything” on Pine Avenue changes in his lifetime.

On my father’s nightstand: two books on horse racing, patchouli candle, note with LUNCH WITH FRANKIE / CHAIN TO FIRTH’S / ITUNE?

One night in the 1980s, one mile from the pharmaceutical plant and three from the one-hundred-and-sixty-seven-foot waterfall, my father accidentally becomes a father, my mother tells me.

My father’s idol is not his father but the television actor his sisters tell him he looks like.

My father works with men who report him to management when he calls them “Benny!” and not Dr. Price.

My father wanted to work at the hospital and not the plant because he prefers people to machines. “Now everything’s a machine,” he tells me.

My father treats Siri like a Magic 8-Ball.

My father takes his iPad to Best Buy when he forgets his Facebook password.

My father creates an Amazon wishlist and adds “ideas” like PEACE for all my FAMILY and FRIENDS and for my numbers to come in.

My father speaks to his brothers in a voice I don’t always recognize.

I speak to my father in a voice I receive but don’t always understand.

My father when the server comes to take our order: “Get whatever you want.”

Since 2008 my father’s ringtone has been the hit single “In the Air Tonight” by Phil Collins. He answers singing.

—

from HELL YEAH–published by Third Man Books.

Buy the book here.

—

Rachelle Toarmino is a poet from Niagara Falls, New York. She is the author of the poetry collections Hell Yeah (Third Man Books, 2025) and That Ex (Big Lucks Books, 2020), as well as several chapbooks, most recently My Science (Sixth Finch Books, 2025). She is also the founding editor in chief of the literary publishing project Peach Mag and the creator and lead instructor of Beauty School, an independent poetry school. She lives in Buffalo.