to my parents


I get the feeling, still, that you two think 
he is a fragile egg & I am a rock,
unbreakable, unshakable, golden.
That’s what our name means, from the German: gold stone. 

Let me tell you, 
I was not as resilient as you thought.
I was not an adult trapped in a child’s body.
I was a child trapped in a child’s body, unable to move.   

Why can’t you see I crack & cry & break & bleed?
I am the egg. He is the fox, 
scratching at the tiny doorway,
looking for more, hungry. 

Phil Goldstein is a journalist and writer who has been living in the Washington, D.C, area for more than a decade. His debut collection, How to Bury a Boy at Sea, is forthcoming from Stillhouse Press, and his poetry has been nominated for a Best of the Net award and is forthcoming or has been published in The Laurel Review, Rust+Moth, Two Peach, 2River View, Awakened Voices, The Indianapolis Review and elsewhere. By day, he works as a senior editor for Manifest, a content marketing agency.