My father tells me when I finally grow up, I’ll become a republican

and I tell him almost all of the universe
is unobservable, but we keep looking
anyway. When my father smokes
cigarettes, he always offers me one.
No, thank you, I say, again and again.
No, thank you. No, thank you. No—
I don’t know anything about my father’s
childhood except he was a mama’s boy—
he used to crawl into her lap, and she’d sway
like a drunk. He was drinking
when he told me this, but he was sober
when he saw a woman on the news
who was raped by her Uber driver.
She shouldn’t have been drinking,
he said, leaning in like it was our secret.
No, thank you. No, thank you.
We never talk about it. We never talk
about the universe—how it’s impossible
to see all of it. Since he got sober,
my father doesn’t call anymore,
and I never call him. I never call.

Samantha Padgett is an MFA Candidate at Sam Houston State University. Her work has appeared in Poet Lore, Driftwood Press, Moon City Review, South Dakota Review, Up the Staircase Quarterly, Rust + Moth, and New Ohio Review. She lives in Huntsville, TX.