Sarah Uheida
I. Father, Persephone’s pomegranates fell out of my mouth
as I came to you asking for the equivalent of ease
and you said the music that played then paralyses now
II. I, too, have turned feral, turned teeth on teeth,
you, too, have sipped Dionysus’s wine straight out of dusk’s collarbone
III. At the entrance of what was once my birthplace, you sat threadbare
and mourned the quietness of quitted beds
you said to resent only the acts of kindness
that sound like D.H. Lawrence’s Self-Pity.
IV. Needled my way through the days
bones bearing a famine yet to come,
O how Father’s hand glistened when I spoke of sin
V. The sheer injustice of pen on paper
The nouveaux literariness of English on my tongue
“I never saw a wild thing sorry for itself.”
VI. Father’s mosaiced litanies, the way he raised me, like hands to the sky,
Undo all my attempts at non-repentance
VII. An oasis of oh no, of Father is no longer father, just another man who could not love my fading out
VIII. For after all,
What is a daughter but a splinter, a hereditary haemorrhage?
IX. God as coaxer of crude confessions; God as the distance between me and the first time I excused myself,
drank & drank in the absences of Jannah
X. There was that one time, though, when you taught me how to spell Mediterranean and I asked whether
inheriting your religion meant I could no longer languish the myths of the Greek
XI. You said I still could.
XII. Father,
How could you not have noticed the teething
XIII. And there was that other time, when I placed an offering at your feet, whisper-yelled:
let me be
your debutante
and I’ll let you hold my body like a grudge.
XIV. Be still, you said, the prayer that played then paralyses now.
Featured on 11 November 2021
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