If by truth you mean hand then yes
I hold to be self-evident and hold you in the highest—
KO to my OT and bait to my switch, I crown
...
My mother does not trust
women without it.
What are they not hiding?
Renders the dead living
...
As in, in the, of course. The body knew
the drill by now. Was are we there yet and then
never been so, then so long. Heart tied
with twine, with shorthairs, trip wires—whispered that bind.
...
Dora Malech grew up in Maryland, and earned a BA in Fine Arts from Yale and an MFA in Poetry from the Iowa Writers’ Workshop. Her awards include a Clapp Fellowship from Yale, Capote and Teaching-Writing Fellowships from Iowa, a Glenn Schaeffer Fellowship, and a Civitella Ranieri Fellowship. Malech's poems have appeared in the New Yorker, Poetry, Poetry London, and elsewhere. She is the author of Shore Ordered Ocean (2010), and Say So (2011). Malech has taught writing at the University of Iowa; Victoria University’s International Institute of Modern Letters in Wellington, New Zealand; Kirkwood Community College in Cedar Rapids, Iowa; Augustana College; and Saint Mary’s College of California. She lives in Iowa City, where she writes, draws, teaches, and coordinates the Iowa Youth Writing Project, an arts outreach program for children and teens.)
Delivery Rhyme
For Alyssa
As anyone
is apt to, you began as someone
else's symptom. As in
other beginnings: drawn lots, blood,
some dancing on the heads of pins
and inside needles' eyes,
cellular revelry,
hopping
of microscopic
turnstiles. Lucky guest,
grist, leapt
long odds to spark
the tinder in the dark.
Then, the subcommittees met:
made merry in duplicate, triplicate
and so on, much of themselves, divided
and divined and concurred.
All sides insides, pre-ambulatory
perambulation meant: sure
ambit, short orbit
in a warm aquarium set
to the muffled music of a single sphere.
As in other beginnings: parting seas, the future's
violent egress, screams and sutures,
aftermath's average agony
on umbilical belay
but soon to solo, unfold all
those origami limbs to test
the inevitable debutante bawl.
Wrest from the nest
and the rest is you, dear:
dressed for the bright lights
in bits of my sister.