“Dissolution of My Father,” “My Mother’s Faith,” and “Crying: Process”

“Dissolution of My Father,” “My Mother’s Faith,” and “Crying: Process”

Dissolution of My Father

Inpatient Hospice

You inhabit me; you narrow to flanks.

Your spineless nerves sear my ventricles.

The creative will will snap your cheekbone—

hush, soil, remains.

Look at the blank between us

squeezing my shoulders.

I breathed through your infamy

at graduation,

mingled, carried my orphaned part,

discarded in a scattering

of peers.

Your socked feet shake now,

betray what you outran:

weakness.

Face compressed to grooves, you

strain to unriddle me.

Your neck, the bruises,

an ardor of decomposition.

You mouth Yoplait,

stilled by the TV’s shifting colors

where an Olympian spirals.

A nurse checks the infusion.

I can’t piece

the fragments

we are

to make you solid

and keep me safe.

You cut my lyric free

of source.

My Mother’s Faith

Your tarnished wound. Uncertain sentences.

Grandpa’s train led to us.

Lament rouses you from mourning. Brand becomes you.

Consummate negation.

A tender orb, Israel.

Anisa Mahmoud Ahmed Ali. 

Crushed bodies, milled, unpurposed—

tear of an F-35.

Tiny limbs writhe for mother’s solidity,

explosives loft an ivory trail.

Smoke carries ashes.

Anwar Muhammad Ahmed Al-Hindi.

The Western guardian can’t exterminate

until chanceless newborns distance your faith.

Feel your lines without a nation.

What have you done?

Our flock of death governs itself.

You outwill mass murder, you sacrifice me.

I’m not Abraham’s son.

Crying: Process

lanced.

Strands stretch, ripples hunger.

Draw snaps columns in refraction.

Friction in soft muscle, the nerve,

gloss on a membrane: archway exposes weeping.

Shutters absorbent, infant, blot the boom unsounded.

Liquid dense, concentrate—

contortion composes us,

scorching becomes because causes becoming

chaos and certain retraction, mixed loyalty.

Particles long for reform,

teetering—be not not be—

spark inversion centering force,

bow, deferential to streak,

squelch a charge, change, glint

torn from intricacy,

clasp manumission, shatter in flower.

Barbed teeth drill intrusions and transport

circuits

About the Author

Jesse Darnay

Jesse Darnay works as a reading interventionist in Chicago. His poetry/fiction has appeared in the Decadent Review, Bridge Chicago, Suspended Magazine, and elsewhere. He's working on his first novella. He has an ongoing pandemic project on Medium.