Forrest Rapier’s Poems Recast Fatherhood as Risk, Work and Inheritance

A father seen from the edge

Forrest Rapier’s two poems approach a father through distance: the gap between a child and an adult, between a remembered road trip and the story a family might tell about it, and between the ground and the steel frame of a rising building. In “My Father, My Aerialist” and “Anti-Portrait,” the father is both intimate and hard to grasp. He is a man who takes his young child across the South without explaining the plan, and a construction worker who walks high above New York as he joins beams into buildings. Rapier makes the tension between those images the poems’ central force.

“My Father, My Aerialist” opens with money kept in a jacket and spent on cheap marijuana, then turns to Lackawanna, Rolling Rock and a pawned locket belonging to Ruth. These details don’t settle into a tidy family history. They arrive as fragments, carrying the weight of money problems and a household whose past the speaker is still trying to understand. The poem’s questions about a father’s strength widen into something more vulnerable: a speaker wonders whether the need to know who his father was in youth reflects ordinary curiosity or loneliness.

That uncertainty takes flight in the image of a flag above the ocean, visible as a warning to those approaching. The speaker, meanwhile, describes strutting for money and lying in camouflage. The shifting images resist a stable account of who is watching whom. The speaker wants to know where the father is, but also imagines him hidden among friends, trees and beachside streets. Searching becomes a way of being near someone who may be absent, elusive or simply difficult to read.

The trip that becomes a childhood

The poem’s most concrete memory begins in Florida. The speaker says that, as a baby, he lived off Summer and Thomas for a time, until his father “kind of kidnapped” him without saying where they were headed or when they would return. The description is startling because it holds two perspectives at once: a child’s dependence on the adult in charge and the adult speaker’s blunt recognition that the journey was frighteningly unexplained.

For a few nights and days, the child lives in the backseat of a Cadillac. Donuts and peanuts stand in for dinner. In Georgia, he plays beneath the seat and counts birds across the South. The compressed geography matters: the trip is measured less by a clear itinerary than by improvised games, snacks and the changing view from the car. What an adult might recall as travel becomes, for the child, a temporary world with its own rules.

Other people join the car: Raiford, Kingsley and Cecil. Their arrival leaves the child less room for “car-gymnastics,” while the threat of losing outside time makes complaints risky. The speaker describes living outside time, a phrase that captures the journey’s suspension. The child is moving through states and days, but has little control over the destination or the decisions being made around him.

Then a danger breaks through the strange routine. Cecil falls asleep at the wheel; Raif yells until the car swerves back toward the straight road. Rapier doesn’t turn this episode into a polished adventure story. Its abruptness explains why the speaker becomes a “crow,” a lookout with eyes peeled for what the adults fail to see. The child’s watchfulness is an adaptation: he takes on the task of scanning the road because the people responsible for the trip seem unable to keep it in view.

That shift gives the poem’s title a double edge. An aerialist performs in exposed space, relying on balance and concentration. The father’s child, too, is suspended in a situation that feels precarious, alert to the next movement and dependent on others to stay safe. The poem doesn’t claim that father and child share the same experience. Instead, its images let the father’s later work at height echo the child’s earlier sense of instability.

From a car to the shield

Near the poem’s close, the scene changes sharply. The speaker sees young people moving in pairs, a boy reaching for a girl, friends following hand in hand on their way to a wedding or dance. The gathering carries a communal ease that contrasts with the child’s confined car journey. Yet the poem doesn’t explain the transition, and that refusal leaves the images suspended beside one another. The speaker knows the pinch of a handcuff, then compares it with placing his face in an azalea bush after spring rain: a bodily sensation moves between restraint and softness.

The opening quotation from Homer’s Iliad returns in the final image of the Shield of Achilles, shining like a disc as large as a doorway and thick as a crib. The poem invokes an ancient scene of people working, then sets that vision against its own modern fragments of family, road danger and remembered spectacle. The shield can suggest protection, but its scale also makes it an object that overwhelms the individual. Rapier leaves the relation open, asking the reader to hold childhood vulnerability alongside the grand images adults use to give stories shape.

Work at a height, care at ground level

“Anti-Portrait” shifts from the child’s memories to the parents’ occupations. The father drives nails into beams above New York, helping turn blueprints into high-rises. The mother works in a hospital, putting people back together and keeping blood inside the body. Rapier builds the poem around the different materials of their labor: steel, air and height on one side; blood, wounds and repair on the other.

The contrast doesn’t reduce either parent to a job. The father’s work gives the poem a physical vocabulary for connection: he welds and hammers pieces together, hoists rebar, and makes structures that will hold rooms for strangers. His workplace is described as a “workshop of air,” a phrase that makes the sky feel like a place where building happens. He is not simply high above the city; he is assembling the spaces other people will inhabit.

The mother’s work offers a parallel form of making. She helps restore people whose bodies have been undone, while the father joins materials into buildings. The poem links the two kinds of labor through construction and repair, then places the speaker inside their shared history: “I am a product of man with a hammer.” That line is less a claim of simple inheritance than a recognition that a person is shaped by the work, risks and images of the people who came before.

The title “Anti-Portrait” signals the poem’s resistance to a conventional family likeness. Instead of fixing the father’s face in a single description, Rapier builds his image from the harness, the wire, the beams and the gaps between places. The father becomes an aerialist once again, moving across an unfinished structure and making connections in midair. But the poem also acknowledges the distance built into that role: he makes rooms for people who are not yet there, and his labor leaves him suspended between the city and the ground.

What the poems leave behind

Rapier’s parents appear together through the language of making, but the poems don’t turn family life into a reassuring account of two complementary professions. The speaker carries unease: the road trip, the sleeping driver, the handcuff’s pinch, the father who is both wanted and difficult to locate. Even the image of marriage and swimming together gives way to the question of what makers leave behind. The poem’s answer is deliberately spare: people make what they make, then nothing.

Yet the poems themselves complicate that bleakness. Buildings remain as places where strangers work and live; the speaker’s memories remain as language, rearranged into images that can be examined from another angle. The father’s high-wire labor and the child’s backseat lookout role aren’t resolved into a single judgment. They stay in tension, giving the poems their clearest insight: inheritance can arrive as an occupation, a fear, a skill of watching, or a story whose meaning changes as the child grows up.

Rapier closes not with a verdict on his father but with a moving shadow, a body and the chill of wind off a river. The concrete takeaway is that closeness doesn’t require a complete portrait. These poems make room for an unfinished one, shaped by what the speaker saw, what he couldn’t understand at the time, and what he still wants to see again.

The post Nothing Says Quality Time Like Being Kidnapped by Dad appeared first on Electric Literature.