Poetry by Niamh Carmichael

In another life, in which my father lived, carpentered, I work in a lab, study
genetics and chromosomes and my father has never
really understood. I’ll explain to him,
I’ll try, but he understands only wood and nails.
Sometimes I’ll lean into his workshop and take a deep breath in of the sawdust
and the cedar. Practice newel posts with spirals
and whorls and details
so delicate I’ll think he made it from Play-Doh. Posed
ballerinas with legs like candle flames, bears and Samurai warriors and lots and lots
of ducks. He used to duck hunt until I was seven
and cried like a baby
when he brought one home. Now he just carves them.
I wonder sometimes why I don’t paint or sculpt or sketch or even graffiti but in the lab
I truly feel like an artist. I think about it then, my own DNA.
From my father, and my father’s
mother, and well beyond either of them, linked together
in my hands and hair and height. Parts of the man standing before me running
within my own blood, stardust in my bones and moonshine
in my organs, helix hair and spiral skin.
I’ll wonder about lingering celestial material and maybe even
a little leftover liquor in my ligaments, tequila and tumors and faulty appendixes. My father
has never understood my job but I have never really understood
him. I know Punnett squares
and Mendel’s pea plants, polypeptides and proteins but not
how his large rough hands could make something as delicate and detailed and shining
as those basswood ballerina legs. I never sculpted,
never sketched, but I do remember
my five ballet years, battements and brisés and my father’s face
all lit up in the shadow. I always wanted to dance Swan Lake because my father loved
ducks and now I stand croisée in a quiet lab. When I visit home
I duck inside his door, inhale
his sawdust, pick a piece of wood and try again.
It’s in there somewhere. His workshop might now be full of only wood and dust
but I can chip into cherrywood too, curl off
strips, little timber twists
like my ballerina twirls, like the corkscrew curls
on my head from his, like the spiral stairs capped by his newels. His helixes are woven
in my hands and in his workshop once more, I think that
I will start to carve like him.

Niamh Carmichael is a writer currently based in Charleston, South Carolina. She has been published in For Page and Screen, A Thin Slice of Anxiety, and Wild Willow Magazine (formerly TMP Magazine). She was a finalist in the SCHC Writing Contest for Volume 12 and a 2026 YoungArts Winner with Distinction in Fiction. When not writing, she’s working on memorizing world capitals.

Photo by Joel & Jasmin Førestbird on Unsplash