Julie Marie Wade was born in Seattle, Washington in 1979 and completed Bachelor of Arts degrees in English and Psychology at Pacific Lutheran University and a Master of Arts in English at Western Washington University.  She has received the Chicago Literary Award in Poetry, the Gulf Coast Nonfiction Prize, the Oscar Wilde Poetry Prize, the Literal Latte Nonfiction Award, the AWP Intro Journals Award, and 6 Pushcart Prize nominations.

Wade says: "The poem, 'Portrait of The Father as Gravity,' is part of a series of poetic portraits that comprise my (as yet) unpublished chapbook, The Prodigal’s Gallery."

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Portrait of the Father as Gravity

by Julie Marie Wade  

We used to make little poems:

to plummet from the summit, to cascade from the arcade…

Both of us dreamed about falling

You can call her the parapet, you can call her the cliff,

but our separate bodies balanced on that precipice:

a compass, a Geiger counter, two packs of Swiss Miss

Like fodder for fortune cookies—the more remote

the body, the less its gravitational force—so you gave up traveling,

your salesman’s garb, your briefcase blocking the gate

Now the vows of marriage work in retrograde,

& the daughter falls beneath your radar’s field:

every tack on the map marks a change in dangerous Velo-Cities

We used to say little prayers:

for the hot & the cold, for the young & the old…

You drew us deeper into love’s Aleutian Arc