ISSN: 1941-4137
POETRY THAT ENACTS THE ARTISTIC AND CREATIVE PURITY OF GLASS
POETRY THAT ENACTS THE ARTISTIC AND CREATIVE PURITY OF GLASS
Carly Joy Miller is the author of Ceremonial (Orison Books, 2018), winner of the 2017 Orison Prize for Poetry, and the chapbook Like a Beast (Anhinga Press, 2017), winner of the 2016 Rick Campbell Prize. Her work has appeared in The Academy of American Poets' Poem a Day, The Laurel Review, Poetry Northwest, Waxwing, and elsewhere. A digital content writer and editor, Carly also teaches in The Writer's Foundry at St. Joseph's University in Brooklyn.
December 18, 2024
Theater of Inheritance
My people’s canon of nonbelief includes hell.
Doesn’t include mother. Includes Magdalene.
(Still she, too, a mother.)
What of saints and whores? Bowls full of horns at their sides.
Pseudohistorical, like in the creation of light, god napped afterward. He, too, has limitations.
He crafted firmament to deepen dark’s potential.
Such spillage, such splotch.
His minor images broke an apple’s peel and multiplied.
Intangible, my people’s canon. If a hangnail were to brush, I smear famine on myself.
Belly slinks back, a deeper potential.
I extend myself with the yad. The yad, your hands upon me, aron hakodesh.
On the other side of heaven, a whore is one who washes a man down to the underside of his nails. A saint so full, even bones have no marrow for the hounds beside her.
Yet how the saint shines — my people’s canon without saints. Only confessors and heroes.
Heroic, how a thought slings my nerve.
Children grab bread with pig on milk. Grease, spillage, splotch.
Your hands upon me: Make a mother of me.
Growing up in a split-faith household, I was included in conversations around spirituality and faith at a young age. This poem reflects how I hold these conversations now: butting up against inherited beliefs, considering the feminine, the anticipation and expectations of adulthood. At my Bat Mitzvah, the fear of touching the Torah, the rules around it, terrified me. I was responsible for my own and my congregation's potential to starve. I needed to hold it, all its tales, and parade it around without slipping. This poem is a release of that pressure, of holding so much, being held wholly, and bearing witness to my potential.
Glass: A Journal of Poetry is published weekly by Glass Poetry Press.
All contents © the author.
All contents © the author.
