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"Lucia" by Prachi Valechha

Larks by Hannah VanderHart

***CW for sexual assault and sexual violence

  I am a girl, Antigone.
  I have a sister. We love
  Each other terribly.

    Robyn Schiff

  You would think that the two Athenians’ bodies
  Were poised on wings, and poised on wings they were,
  Philomela flying off to the woods
  As a nightingale, and Procne as a swallow
  Rising up to the eaves.

    Ovid, trans. Stanley Lombardo

i.

My sister tells me she is a bird.
She does not say she is a bird

but I know it to be true. She wheels
and dives. Her pinions swoop.

Somewhere, moss and toothwort
carpet the wood floor. Somewhere:

generations of birds are born.

ii.

The nest of eggs. The shed
in the woods. The foxy

gentleman and the lupines
around Jemimah.

Her feathered desire.
Into this story Beatrice

poured her sympathy
like tea in a china cup.

The hounds lick up
the broken eggs.

iii.

My sister tells me
and my memory

is clean, an empty stair
though she says

I walked up them,
opened the door.

That I called
my father

at work. What
is this? This

nothing
in my brain –

this blank day –
my life had stood

a loaded gun.

iv.

If you slammed a door
too hard

in my family’s house
a rifle would fall

from the top
of the wooden buffet—

a gun always seemed
to be falling.

It never went off.

v.

My other sister’s harm, I remember—
another bird in the rafters--

anger on my body like a fine
dust on Mars, in my lungs;

anger where the stairs
met hardwood hallway,

entryway rugs, the stairs still
carpeted, not yet creaking.

My pacifying mother.
My other, younger sister.

vi.

I want an otherworldly ex-
planation for unkindness which

is the milk of this world.

vii.

Anger is different than rage.
Rage: a hurricane that makes

the whole world wet.
Anger: directed at another

person like the sharpness
of a scalpel; acknowledging

a person the way a wing
acknowledges a buffet of air:

by flying into it. The way wing
makes power of a draft—rides it.

viii.

The confusion is one of having
nothing. The confusion is

I have two sisters, whom I love.
They have hands and tongues.

But we three sisters have different
memories, speckled and striped.

Facets of a stone. Points on a shell.

ix.

I don’t mean to go on long,
to go on with longing—

like a pilgrim with a distance still
to go, and a burden on their back—

but at one time all three of us were
flannelled and nightgowned,

on the couch together. The moon
lit. The cedars filling the night.

Happy. Laughing. Last century.

x.

Sometimes something has to be
a wing, a joint and tendon: a

wooden spoon, a dowel rod, wax—
as many feathers as you can pluck

with your own two hands from a bird
that only two minutes ago ran through

the clover on its yellow, spurred feet.

xi.

For each thing given to you,
make one thing up. For every name

told, recite a new name. For each
received story with a man making

a woman, build your own person
out of feathers and flowers.

Daedalus, Pygmalion: let them go.

xii.

Arachne asks you to come and sit.
Never mind her many legs. Move over.

Gossamer silk, the spider’s throwing
line, has the filament strength of alloyed

steel. Arachne will teach you nothing.
You teach her how to spin a tale so long

she can climb down the end and jump.

xiii.

It will always matter that you
are a woman. Or that someone

saw you as one (or not one) in the past,
sees you as one (or not one) in the present,

future. That bird is slang for a woman,
as well as any “man made object”

(aircraft, rocket, satellite) that resembles
a bird by flying, being aloft.

That “the bird” is an obscene gesture;
your finger practically raises itself.

xiv.

*
*
*
*

My sisters tell me I am a bird


Hannah VanderHart lives in Durham, North Carolina, under the pines. She has poetry, nonfiction and reviews published in Kenyon Review, The American Poetry Review, Poetry Northwest, AGNI, The Adroit Journal, RHINO Poetry, Tinderbox Poetry Journal, and elsewhere. Her book, What Pecan Light, is forthcoming from Bull City Press in Spring 2021, and she is the reviews editor at EcoTheo Review. More at: hannahvanderhart.com

Prachi Valechha is a freelance cartoonist and animator from India. Valechha loves to make Toons and Toons for Tunes.
You can find more of their work at: instagram.com/rainbowteeth
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© 2023 Up the Staircase Quarterly
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