Youngest Daughter
Away from the ribbons of a valise, a young alcove introduced a daughter to the crib, and her rite included observation of the solitary masses. She bethinks the caryatid cradling the temple enshrining her infantile feet and glances betwixt the free-headed women.
I sought the body of the camp, and the upper neighborhood bore me a fascination. My winters purchased me a theatric opera, where the rain sang the hymn of the deceased, but all the writing on the wall could hear was a dissonance.
I was a passenger in an impecunious automobile, and my diaries were but velvet and bathed in graphite. I returned home to a sequence of devoted paint even though my house is devoid of commissioned art. How did I witness a chant of the bourgeoisie in the tunnel of sedition and monastery?
But it could have been the disguise and not the mask, the hanging gardens and not the tribune. The angel on my tomb, weeping and frail, captures what is left of my sunken tail. Does the bereaved death behold the weight of the martyred or is the ascended soul the poundage of the unfallen corpse?
I read of a book when I was merely a couple years old about the uxoricide and the venture of chess. And I understood, back then, of how the queen can only be most influential in the presence of the king. Of how jealousy is the enemy of custody. The window brought the senses of the petrichor into my quilted skull.
It was my grandmother’s library but also mine. My grandfather’s shelves and maudlin shrine. It was my defeat to watch the foxing of the books and the tattering of the cushion. Time rejoiced next to me, with its vanity on the seat and its puerility trying to sink its teeth in me.
Time is a very covetous being, immature and simulating. Its only lover is memory, and memory is but a fleeting illustration in the presence of woe. Memory is dual whilst time is not. Why does this life feel as if I have been a native to misfortune as a balance to a previous spirited opulence?
I have walked through halls whose mason I ought to be very strange in connecting with, I have eaten platters whose sumptuous repast is but another last supper. My emerald gown guides my clock, and time reduces me to a recollection. Isn’t it the oddest of endeavors to partition reincarnation as a hybrid of time and memory? I know not of what I have seen, but it was neither the future nor the present.
Every creation is to be reversed, with life meeting death and the soul meeting eschaton. The caterpillar’s violence turns into a Monarch, and the sword meets the maker. The coins pierce Judas, and the atonement breeds sin.
How forgiving is a well washed by sickness? I suppose only its drought can tell, but by then it would have given the neck an entry to doom. How is every born infant a savior when it is adulthood that has recognized the Nazarene’s turn into a shepherd without a lamb, and Nazareth into a colony?
Abandon thy angelhood, this is the land of men.
I no longer propose faith or prophethood, but I do wonder if I am betraying my oracular ancestry that has seen the rise of the ouster and still chose the flames of God’s stakes. My mother’s last name is a Star followed by Solomon, so perhaps, I must be less cold-blooded as I trace where I must be placed.
But I am watching my sainthood melt, and the wood seems to be posed for reasons other than to be seen and felt. Alas! Do they not bother to kneel by the rise of my divine scent?
I suppose that is why I am not nearly as Godly as my birth might have prophesized, for I cannot yet raise the newly defiled sky, or tear the chords of a sacrilegious ukulele. I behold no stripes of credence, is that why?
When martyrs pass away, and their soul is yet to be bred in the bone, are they to be versed in this future liberation? If this entire existence is a trial, does the judge declare our homeland as inconsequential?
It is of utmost discomfiture to postulate my martyrdom as androcentric, for my pure, arrowlike hair has caught the phonetic pyre and regendered the cross. Aren’t all scorched witches martyrs, too?
Do not speak to me about matricides for it is futile to outwit me. You battle as if I have not fought with my shredded womb for giving me blood because of my lack of deliverance, as if I had not called the framing of a woman blasphemy, and my bodily mechanisms a Punic faith. Yet, what wounds more- the forsworn strand or the ripped one?
I have declared to be fleshed out of the rebellion of Lilith, born of primordial clay and not a half-parted sea. I never wished to mount Adam, but why did he yearn to command me?
I have long wondered if this is truly my maiden life, for I seem to be possessing an uncanny fluency with civilizations whose ruins have not touched my skeletal elbows.
My father was raised by the rifle, but he was also raised by words. My mother is a writer, but she spent her youth moving between a refugee camp and the rich earth. I am a poetic mutiny; I am their youngest daughter.
