James Ciano
The Committee of Men (Shopping)
We were at the mall.
Everything was on sale.
The light was horizontal
through the doorways,
and he walked ahead of me.
My eyes were the height
of his hands, and the skin,
like a sidewalk, had cracked
along the ridge of his knuckles.
At the store he bought
a leather jacket,
which he checked against
his clipping from
the penny saver.
He had me try it on,
as a joke. It was heavy,
but soft, and his smile
was real beneath
the fluorescent lights
like electric femurs.
It was the first nice thing
I had seen my father do
for himself, and also
the last. Before leaving
he stopped at a table
and lifted a black scarf
in his hands.
Feel this, he said,
and pressed the scarf
to my face.
James Ciano reads “The Committee of Men (Shopping)”
James Ciano’s debut collection The Committee of Men is forthcoming from BOA Editions in April, 2026. He is the 2025-2027 Creative Writing Fellow in Poetry at Emory University.