I don’t remember my father’s fortieth birthday.

At mine they brought out a dairy dessert,

caramel calligraphy its salutation.

Never happy over a gift of clothes,

cashews are his joy. I wrap them,

box-bow from the pantry that holds

my trial-by-ceramics, a tortoise

with toothpicks raked across pre-kiln shell.

Here he keeps beer-flavored skyscrapers,

steins purchased in Germany, photos of a Berlin

buzzcut. I’d query the Brandenburg Gate if I want

an attempt at who he was. I know he lived

in White Plains, that he had a vasectomy

in 1983. The cystectomy, thirty-

six years later. What will they

extract, should he crack 111?

The frequency of urination after forty,

urban legend, though the pee speech is

the first thing I give men friends that year.

A symptom of my suspected hyperparathyroidism:

more trips to drain the lizard. I learn about

the parathyroid gland when my blood panel

shows elevated calcium levels, the fluid

in me possibly turning my bones

to curbside delivery. Worst case

scenario? A parathyroidectomy.

My family and its fucking -ectomies.

My father and his portable biergartens.

One’s gray with some Deutsche creature

like it could tear the vas deferens out

of a manticore. The other, bucolicized.

They serve as coin silos. His bladder’s tumor

put fifty-cent pieces to shame. His turning the house

inside out, demonstrated when pet hamsters went AWOL

from their mammal hovel by the unused fireplace.

The flue-facing wall’s other side, a shower unrun

during the thirty-six years we lived in this home.

He found them in the front closet, privy to a family

tree’s marriage marred by lamination

bubble. He found them after slicing

the couch’s underside. Den surgery

in the name of recovery,

butter knife a caduceus.

You can removal anything.

He and I were against his bladder exodus,

my mother and siblings agreeing

with doctors the day they laid out

treatment’s course. A year it took Dad

to plane the hyphen that cables life to altering. 

He wears a turtleneck over his ostomy.

From his operation, I was absented.

His groin, de-battened by medical techs.

To what suture-calligraphy do we relate?