HARLEY CHAPMAN
Finalist for the 2023 Rachel Wetzsteon Chapbook Award
I.
I clip my tongue too often & it all comes out in waterfalls. Violence begets violence. What am I trying to say? You hurt me. You don’t care. Not quite. You don’t care the way I want you to, in a language I can wear. The jokes are jokes until they’re no longer jokes. We are both prone to throwing salt. I devoured that red-salt planet bathed in snow & tasted home. To slip outside the body would be a forgiveness. To have the body slip outside itself, a punishment.
I’m falling out in red millimeters. Every part of me wet salt. There is no time for mourning. Rub salt on my cheeks. Learn to read tea leaves while kneeling, feel each pore of pavement imprinting through my jeans.
I left in fear of cold air & found nothing worth fearing. Count the shawls discarded like angels in the dirt.
Confessional
This isn’t the last poem I’ll ever write, or the sharpest.
I can’t keep calling the father Cronos.
There is nothing extraordinary about loving what hurts you.
In this family shame is just another mother-tongue
& I am only good at handing out counterfeit forgiveness.
Each time they draw an ill organ from my body
I think the problem has been excavated, finally.
It re-roots again & again.
Press my tongue firmly to the lump in my gums to stay it's bursting.
Look, I love my father. I can't destroy him.
You can't call a wolf a wolf without dooming the animal to wolfdom.
Forgive the leg of lamb in his teeth.
Look through the river to the rippled girl with golden hair,
waiting to be punctured.
Look across her bare arms, unarmored,
each feature momentarily unsharpened, uncaved.
She does not yet want to be a weapon.
She does not yet want to feel her bones.
How does a girl become an arrow? What makes her want to?
Copyright © April 2023 Harley Anastasia Chapman
Harley Anastasia Chapman holds an MFA in poetry from Columbia College Chicago & a BA in English with a focus on women & gender studies from Illinois State University. In 2019 she was awarded the Allen & Lynn Turner commencement poetry prize, and she was a finalist for the 2023 Rachel Wetzsteon Chapbook Award. Her poems can be found in Nimrod International Journal, Superstition Review, Soundings East, & Columbia Poetry Review, among others. Her first chapbook, "Smiling with Teeth," is available through Finishing Line Press.
