No impression of my father's brokenness sticks with me like that of the skin graft scars around his belly. How could he not be broken when his very skin was permanently broken? Much of his waist's circumference lacked a first layer of skin because it had been taken off for grafts, covering up the skin that had been burned in his work as a hot tar roofer.

I doubt he got those burns in anger. But when I think of what led him to the life of a hot tar roofer, it's hard to think of anything other than anger. The father lost so young, the court-martial, the petty crime sprees that landed him in prison. They were fueled by anger, and where did that fuel get him? To a job that broke down his body, that's where.  

I imagine there's a picture out there, lost in some trash heap or in the album of another, that shows me and my dad in the backyard, sitting on folding webbed chairs and looking up at the sky. The picture has to exist somewhere. It can't fail to exist. I need it. I wrote this poem because of that picture. If the picture is gone—or if it never existed, and was only made tangible by my imagination—can the poem continue to exist? 

The skin grafts really did look weird. He sometimes let me touch the rectangles on his belly where the doctors had scalpeled off the top layers of skin. 

Did they hurt, Dad? Did you not want people to see them, and does this explain why you didn't like to go to the beach?  When you saw them, did you think of your brokenness too? Did you think of the anger that you broke yourself with, that you broke yourself against?