Zoë Fay-Stindt
How We Write the World to Life Again
I love watching the bowed heads, how,
prayer-like, though faith floats thin
these days, we curl in to do the work:
bring our pens down until they breathe
something we thought stilled. Is this it?
Is this how we resuscitate each other?
A poem is no check, no hour of sleep, no, is not
the restored heart of our lost uncle or gone
sister. But let it be something, goddamn it.
Let us open our eyes when we come to,
and let us come to, again, refilled
with something life-like, even. We see you,
wrangled paradigm. We see you, ruined binary:
flourish or death. What families have you ruined
today? What good health? What new beginning
have you brought into bed with you, then burned?
Oh, I know, big drama. It’s all flash with us,
all rah-rah until we go home,
and most of us always go home.
We always take to our nails, eventually,
so sure they’ve grown inches since we got here,
assembling, showing our good cause off
with our teeth. Give me your huddled,
give me your muddy shoes at the door.
Give me every good callus, every departed skin:
there, start again. This time the consciousness birthed you,
and you have been screaming inside her for years,
tearing, waiting to break in. Don’t wait for the settled time.
Go on, I see your fingers twitching—this is the page.
Here, the pen. You’ve got all this goodness
to hold, and so many to hold it with you,
though you can’t see them from here.
They told us there was only one way
forward, with both tired hands
gripping that fragile, oracular body.
—Submitted on 05/14/2020
Zoë Fay-Stindt is a bicontinental poet with roots in both the French and American south. Her poems have appeared in fields, The Indianapolis Review, Winter Tangerine, Rust and Moth, The Floating Zo, and others journals.
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