I think of all the fucking
I would not have done
if my father had lived
and I rush to bury him again.
This time I’m wearing a skirt,
both my hands filled with soil.
I throw it like confetti into the gaping
earth of his grave. Here I am: alive,
daughter of a godly man,
dutiful as an anchor,
I would have married a godly man, too,
to please him who I loved so much
I kept his name,
made it the cleanest part
of what he would have named:
dirty. Ask me where I’m going tonight.
I was a child: unbleeding
in my white cotton.
The seed of what has become all this urgent
want was there when we burned him.
I am like that sometimes: heat
where should be comfort; gone
where should be calm, dead
where one might think my smile belongs.
Sometimes I am synapse:
alive only in connection.
I think of all the bodies
and return to the one I love
most. I am a gift
my father gave to me.
His carcass, a dowry
that I might marry myself
as a nun marries and uses
the idea of a god to justify it.
I am in the bed
alone, on the couch
alone, on the floor
alone. If we are fucking, I am
the only god in the room.
—Nicole Homer (Blackbird: an online journal of literature and the arts)