Photograph of My Father, Age Seven

Winner: 2025 Charles Simic Poetry Prize

A brown-haired boy holds

a stuffed Saint Bernard & waves at me.

His chubby arms are freckled,

flecked with blonde hairs

like a little golden bear.

The bow of his lips blushed

& cracked from perpetual licking.

I wonder if he is afraid

of never waking up,

like me,

or locks the door

at the burst of a beer can

against the living room wall.

Behind his pintsized body, sunlight leaks out

through the trees in reddish pink.

He braces his legs to run at the camera,

to leap.

I could catch him, I think.

I could hold him.

Olivia Jacobson is an MFA candidate in poetry at Syracuse University. She is the editor-in-chief of Salt Hill Journal. Her chapbook, On Junkyards, won the Etchings Press Book Prize for Poetry (forthcoming). Her work appears or is forthcoming in The Florida Review, Moon City Review, Shō Poetry Journal, Outskirts Literary, Watershed Review, Rust & Moth, Cottonmouth Journal, Club Plum, SUNHOUSE Literary, The Shore, The Eckerd Review, and Rougarou.