Dad Era

A dad is a parent is a human.

 

I have this crazy idea that I could never escape my father’s shadow.

 

A dad is garbage is gone.

 

First, my father disappeared and then my mother abandoned all rational thought.

 

It was my father who told me nothing.

To be creative. To be loving. To be generous and kind and human were all lessons that I learned           alone in the snow.

 

You are a fireball.

 

You are a being of infinite love.

 

A friend once said to me “fuck dads.”

 

Did you know that being alone is sometimes terrifying?

 

If a dad exists or doesn’t exist can we still be whole?

 

If I’ve learned one lesson in all of this, it’s that you are a whole world.

 

I am a human being and I have made more mistakes than I can count.

 

Rely on yourself.

 

Love for yourself should be eternal and everlasting.

 

You are brilliant and shining and the brightest star in the sky.

 

Did you know that you can be a contestant on Master Chef Jr if you want?

 

As a person, I have not been the same since you came into my life.

 

I am no expert in racial passing but I do know that declining invitations to the Calgary Stampede is one the strangest things I’ve ever had to do.

 

Bright children are those that sometimes see themselves in the mirror.

 

You and I sometimes share one heart.

 

Maybe it’s true that I would climb a mountain just to see you smile, Phoenix. A human is a child is a parent.

 

The thing about climate change is that it’s not personally my fault but I am responsible for your well-being and this gives me pause.

 

I once went on a research retreat about biodiversity at the Banff Centre and I ended up sharing some of these lines in a well air-conditioned conference room.

 

Jordan Abel is a queer Nisga’a writer from Vancouver. He is the author of The Place of Scraps (winner of the Dorothy Livesay Poetry Prize), Un/inhabited, and Injun (winner of the Griffin Poetry Prize). NISHGA won both the Hubert Evans Non-Fiction Prize and the VMI Betsy Warland Between Genres award, and it was a finalist for the Hilary Weston Writers’ Trust Prize for Nonfiction, the Wilfrid Eggleston Award for Nonfiction, and the Roderick Haig-Brown Regional Prize. Abel’s latest work, a novel titled Empty Spaces, was published by McClelland and Stewart in Canada (fall 2023) and Yale UP for the world excluding Canada (spring 2024). Abel completed a PhD at Simon Fraser University in 2019, and is currently an associate professor in the Department of English and Film Studies at the University of Alberta, where he teaches Indigenous Literatures, Research-Creation, and Creative Writing.