FIDELITY IS NOT DEAD
Fidelity’s baby is dead. She named him Bruce
and he said goodbye, slipped into the toilet,
stingray resplendent. It hurt. Fidelity scooped
his jelly body out the bowl and buried him under
the camelia, placed a brick over his head; a Virgin
of Guadalupe candle too (even though she’s had it
with the Virgin). Some women don’t bury their jelly
babies. Some don’t give them names. Some don’t
tell anyone they birthed a jelly baby on the weekend.
Fidelity is not some women. Fidelity tries to trust
her body again—invites it out for coffee, asks what
it does for a living; doctors tell her body to try again.
Fidelity tries to chart her surges, tries to make love
even though love makes death. People say her dead
baby is the shade of hope. When did they last birth
a stingray? Don’t tell Fidelity about hope. Don’t tell
her about fish oil. Don’t tell her about mystics. Don’t
tell her to stick needles in her body at strategic points.
Don’t tell Fidelity she’s thirty-eight, daily. Don’t tell
her about prayer beads, holy water, wine fasts and
running fast. Fidelity knows a thing or two about
quackery. Fidelity prefers boa constrictors to babies,
falcons to friends, lizards to lovers, horn sharks to hope.
ABOUT THE POET
Ann-Marie Blanchard teaches poetry and philosophy at The University
of Notre
Dame on the west coast of Australia, having taught writing for a decade at
universities in the US. Her work has appeared in The Missouri Review, A Public
Space, Adroit Journal, Palette Poetry, Meanjin Quarterly, Westerly, Cordite
Poetry Review,
and elsewhere. In 2022, she won The Missouri Review
Editors’ Prize in Fiction.
ABOUT SUGAR HOUSE REVIEW
We loved reading the work that we’ve published (clearly), and we want an
opportunity to better hear our contributors. We're featuring audio recordings of
poems from our pages, read by the poet. This an open invitation to all contributors
from any of our issues, we were delighted to print your work, now we’re eager to
hear it.
No comments:
Post a Comment