Photo by Shutter Runner
I am made for our own goddamn kitchen
I’ve wrecked us &
cannot light the stove pilot out
& clicking box of casino matches
my hands juddering Sometimes you carry
watermelon not gently not
to protect it not like a baby & when
you slice I’m aware of the tattoo
you’ve sharpied on your forearm numbers
of blood sugar levels correct doses
of Clozapine & patient names
I need this care the candles you light
my hair caught in the flame remember
our first unholy apartment
we watched another girl like me
learning to fly We thought
she was learning to fall
That ledge remember My novice hope
in tarot my resolve in history in 1867
a French pharmacist claiming
five stoppered bottles contained
the charred bones of my teenage saint remains
of my maiden You held
my hand as the Catholic church accepted
but the bottles were misplaced
they were shelved until a forensic scientist
unpinned them from legend
& tested their promise If I were
the scientist with my white coat & clipboard
I would have done the same
You’ve assured me I’ve ruined myself
with a need for proof A human rib a small
leg bone not human Lord that cat’s broken
femur tarred black The bones couldn’t have been
merely burned The scientist found
bitumen pinewood resin gypsum
Embalming They were mummy bones
Not my sainted girl
schizophrenic heroine but a hoax
I nearly cried when I heard this
Remember You had to stop me
from excavating my own bones
I wasn’t always a nonbeliever Remember
how I wanted the bones
to belong to the dead girl
(First appeared in Fairy Tale Review (Charcoal Issue))
Jennifer Givhan is a Mexican-American writer and activist from the Southwestern desert and the author of three full-length poetry collections: Landscape with Headless Mama (2015 Pleiades Editors’ Prize), Protection Spell (2016 Miller Williams Poetry Prize Series), and Girl with Death Mask (2017 Blue Light Books Prize). Her honors include a National Endowment for the Arts fellowship, a PEN/Rosenthal Emerging Voices fellowship, the Frost Place Latin@ scholarship, a National Latino Writers’ Conference scholarship, the Lascaux Review Poetry Prize, Phoebe Journal’s Greg Grummer Poetry Prize, and the Pinch Poetry Prize. Her work has appeared in Best of the Net, Best New Poets, Poetry Daily, Verse Daily, Ploughshares, POETRY, TriQuarterly, Boston Review, AGNI, Crazyhorse, Witness, Southern Humanities Review, Missouri Review, and The Kenyon Review. She is editor-in-chief of Tinderbox Poetry Journal, and teaches at The Poetry Barn and Western New Mexico University. www.jennifergivhan.com