The Stay and Still Life
He was in the room
before I was awake.
“Shhhh…………”
He shredded my childhood
with hands wet like a mouth.
It was my room, his room,
until I reclaimed it
decades later
after I’d killed memory,
then recalled, and forgave him
and the torn fabric of myself.
He died and with him
the stay of execution
I’d have had to pray for
to save my life
after taking his.
The canvas still reeks of him.
Words inscribed in the night
loudly speak of him—
only now I choose
will continue to choose
the color of this stay.
B.E. Kahn, a native Philadelphian, now lives in Wynnewood, Pennsylvania. She is a recipient of Pennsylvania Council of the Arts and Pew Grants. She was awarded First Prize for Poetry at the Philadelphia Writers Conference and some of her other awards include The Lotus Bloom Journal and The Missouri State Poetry Prize.
Her poems have appeared in Harrisburg Review, Philadelphia Poets, CQ, California Quarterly, Bridges A Jewish Feminist Journal, Jewish Spectator, Earth's Daughters, Half Tones to Jubilee, The Lucid Stone, Laurel Leaves, The Laughing Dog, In the Small Courtyard of the Convent, Mad Poets Review, Schuylkill Valley Journal, New Verse News and the Tupelo Press Online Poetry Project among other publications.
A retired speech therapist, she teaches poetry to intergenerational, interfaith, community based groups, some under the auspices of the Arts and Spirituality Center. |
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