POETRY

paterfamilias

By Maurya Kerr     VOLUME 55.2

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when the word father disappeared from the dictionary, so did
its brethren papa & daddy & master, brethren
that--

for as long as we could remember, for as long as
our first fond then armored hearts had kept count
from embryo to now (one beat
two beat three beat four) with such patience
amidst a grief long unnamed, inchoate, like the flutter
on tip of tongue when saying felicity, or
living in the broken thing before you know
what’s broke, or
the expectancy of promise + girl,
each unchristened grief the daughter
of something, someone--

had kept us breathless, heart-stop,
ready-to-kill but still
as moss searching for its very
own stone,

a great space, green & lush, opened within each
of us, flung agape,

& a great space, opened up before us,
the forest singing a new song
from the songbook
of all bird + song,

so we skipped & sped dazzle-eyed
rings around the rosey trees,
trees we had long longed to rub up against
like the baby bear we saw once
in the copse, her eyes closed so pure
so pleasured & now we could too,

screaming sassafras because of its sound
at the top of our lungs, tearing off
dresses & tops to feel woodsy & bark,
running naked nothing riven,

soon such brown sounds soft in our mouths,

to see the forest cyclops slowly die, our
small selves no longer struck beneath
his one eye--
now shuttering, now
blind, but once
as patient as our hearts & perhaps as grieving--

pressed rapt to the holes drilled
in every forest tree trunk
by the three-toed black-backed woodpeckers
whom he’d wheedled with acorns
& berries & asters & azure eggs--

holes not meant to house nests for the unhatched hopes,
eggy oval shells warmed by papas
each night--

even though the woodpeckers, knowing
deeply of love, knew that love
would never peep through holes.



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MAURYA KERR is a Bay Area-based writer, educator, and artist. Maurya’s poetry has been nominated for a Pushcart prize and appears or is forthcoming in multiple journals, including Magma Poetry, Chestnut Review, Tupelo Quarterly, and an anthology, The Future of Black: Afrofuturism, Black Comics, and Superhero Poetry. Much of her artistic work, across disciplines, is focused on Black and brown people reclaiming their birthright to both wonderment and the quotidian. Maurya was recently chosen by Jericho Brown as a runner-up in Southern Humanities Review’s 2021 Auburn Witness Poetry Prize, and her first chapbook, Muttology, will be published with Harbor Editions in 2023. Maurya is currently a 2021 / 22 UC Berkeley ARC (Arts Research Center) Poetry & the Senses Fellow.


VOLUME 55.2