Ina Roy-Faderman
digging
white and chalky,
the skull of the world,
picked clean by
something much less than—
because you’ve created what’s left:
a hollow bowl for bones.
this is not the work of raw-necked
vultures.
they faded with the last
long drink of water, in the dry valleys
where layers of shale
shift under the weight of sand.
surely someone warned you that blood
will be the first drink to go.
are you afraid that your sacrifice
has been for nothing?
you have sacrificed my child and
my child’s children and the generations
that wither like thornapple pods
until there’s
no seminal drink left, just
dry powder, with nothing left
to stir it back to life.
Ina Roy-Faderman’s work has appeared or is forthcoming in Surreal Poetics, Inscape, HIV Here & Now, and the Tupelo 30/30 project, among others. Dana Gioia recently named her “Elegy for Water” the outstanding poem of the Richmond Anthology of Poetry. A native Nebraskan of Bengali heritage, she received her formal creative writing training at Stanford and the University of California, Berkeley. She currently teaches bioethics at Oregon State University, is a fiction editor for Rivet Journal, and works as a school librarian.
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