My deaf father loves to hear my voice

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the way we all love best the thing we cannot have. I broke
and re-broke the same toes again and again; and now, they will
never grow straight. I do not regret my first wedding — because,
my father, my twin, was arm-candy on that aisle, and nothing
is more delicate than my son’s sleepy eyes each purple morning.
These days, my father’s hearing aids are small robotic worms,
they crawl into his ears like secrets, but still, he plays car music
loud as an airport; still, the TV roars like a highway; and his ears
don’t work, but his biceps are so strong that he arm-wrestled
a glass-eater and beat him in less than a second. Candles, never
allowed in our house, because twice my father watched every
thing he ever owned morph into nothing, into smoke;
his toenails are crooked as mine, but he doesn’t care; and I
never worried that he wouldn’t hear me having a nightmare
one-hundred miles away because there are vibrations that cut
deeper than all the structures of the human body, that push water
higher, then lower, on land, that make sure there is a very small
little bit of noise left, even after the rest of it has run dry.