Sam Collier
The Daughters Go
Before you can count to one
hundred we are out the door, our long
toes claw mud, our knees split seams,
we crash from here our mouths
full of biting. No fairytale can hold us
in its quiet tower now. We’ve all grown up
and turned to witches. That sharp
and sure. That fond of wicked beaked
birds, murderous cats, the curl of smoke
a chimney in the wood makes.
Once we sang sweetness for the moon
faced boys; we even liked to listen to
their games of war and money.
To dream something coastal, something
green. We brushed our hair, we studied
courts and commerce, we slept.
Turns out what broke the spell was
stories. A boy staring, masked in dust,
a hundred children trapped in fire,
a baby wreathed in saltfoam, clutching
death. Like ancient divinations coming true,
the stories came for us. Now we go,
muscled and read, our wits and knuckles
honed. We know how lies can lure and gold
can vanish. If a girl’s belly
is slate where strangers scratch out
their beliefs, we have the bile and the teeth,
we have the law, the holy. If
a man’s dark shoulderblade is thieved
of breath, if even as he runs his blood
is stolen, if a woman traveling
is captured on the road, and dies
in prison, if boys buy sweets at night
and die in the grass, if bankers
poison rivers and soldiers empty
houses and kings anoint themselves,
we must kiss ourselves
awake. Bloody our hands on stones
of this castle. Carry our blades to the rooms
of our fathers. Enlist
their battled arms. Call up captains;
bid them turn the ships. Find the weather
wizards in their fortress;
counter their ocean-boiling curse.
Look: our mothers labor in the fields, their hands
are two thirds full of shadow,
the sun’s gone down, the sky’s gone blue
with ache. We run to tell them, tell them, tell them
Sam Collier is a playwright and poet originally from Washington, D.C. and currently dividing time between Chicago and northern Michigan. Sam’s poems have appeared in Sixfold, Iron Horse Literary Review, The Puritan, Mortar Magazine, Liminal Stories Magazine, Prompt Press, and Guernica. She is the 2017-19 Writer in Residence with the National Writers Series of Traverse City. Sam holds an MFA in playwriting from the University of Iowa, where she was the 2015-16 Provost’s Visiting Writer in playwriting.
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