Leather in Heaven

By Grace Yu

This piece challenges the gender stereotypes surrounding masculinity through two father-son relationships. The narrator’s father associates masculinity with anger, but the cowboy father teaches his son that true strength comes from being kind to others.

There’s leather in heaven I think
on tiny cowboy boots slicked with mud
Rough hands of blackjack oak stroking
your boy’s miniature fingers. His sun is
helianthus and warm brown hickory tree and
your sun is his warmth. He rides
Shetland ponies, among
blue cornflowers in tallgrass prairie and you
saddle your warhorse.

Back then,
I thought people starved for spring
Frozen dirt clinging to cracked nails and
gayfeathers kissing purple feet and
back then,
I followed lost deer pricked by
false indigo promises and
back then,
my father thought he could stitch
the wounds cut from his anger
with black-eyed susans. I had no one
to fix my flower boots.

You hammer leather for him with
Gentle oak hands, his ankle bones
curved with adoration and
You sew the cowhide bent into his laughter.
His ankles are never frigid
like mine.

You play cowboys but
don’t tell him to kill Indians. The best soldiers hesitate
before killing a man and
that’s a fact, anyway,
he doesn’t need a warhorse yet. He gallops
smiling high heels raised and pointed toes
with grass stains because
his heart is lifting out of his boots and
his boots are rising in his stirrups and
his stirrups are three and a half feet above ground and
swinging lightly in the warm spring breeze, so
this is how little boys become ballerinas
even after they play with fake guns
and shoot wide-eyed deer. Cowboys
carried their own handkerchiefs and
you told him,
Who says they couldn’t cry too?

My heels have not forgotten sharp Indian grass and
my insole is cleaved to my outsole
with loneliness. Your
hand-fastened lemonwood pegs,
delicately stitched cording
trace flowers on his boots.

There’s leather in heaven and
my father’s black-eyed susans are pressed flat
underfoot.
Your legacy is in the embroidery
you leave on your boy’s boots.

Process

This poem was initially meant to be a sweet, nostalgic poem about childhood and what it means to grow up. Then I wrote the lines “so this is how little boys become ballerinas/even after they play with fake guns/and shoot wide-eyed deer,” and realized there was more to my writing that I wanted to address. I wrote this piece to talk about toxic masculinity and what it means to be a man. The harmful stereotypes perpetuated in our society cause people to associate strength with anger, rather than with love and understanding. In the narrator’s heaven, as well as my vision for a better society, fathers love their sons and teach them that the best man is someone who is kind and cares for others.