• Home
  • Essays
  • Fiction & Poetry
  • Comics & Art
  • Shrapnel
  • About
Blunderbuss Magazine
Poems

Three Poems

By Hafizah Geter @RhetoricAndThis ·

my mother rises from her deathbed

her face crawls up my throat
until i cannot help but be
inside her mouth. she speaks

me sour, she speaks me clean.
this one who does not leave
me with my womanhood,

this one who sits me down in her womb
and wants to make me stay,
she is the dark skin

i peer through,
beautiful as dark knees
bent in this prayer, this one

this one who digs her way out
to me, as if she wanted
something back.

 

The afternoon is polite

The dogs cruel   A woman plants

my name in her bone

but will not tell me

when rain is coming

 

In the park children take what’s theirs

from the earth, their laughter                like a chain

of wedding dresses           I fear the tenderness

 

Days, she wore me

slung over her

ribs / like a rag

 

She lifted the limbs of a mountain

& the flowers

tapered

like tiny black dresses

 

Important to tell her

how the wind makes headstones from ripples

in the lake          The dogs bob in & out

like taxis

 

People spend all day choosing

their gods

 

Lottery

“It isn’t fair,” she said. A stone hit her on the side of the head.
–Shirley Jackson, “The Lottery”

if the birds were not black
crickets upon
further inspection,

I would wake for the scent
of pine trees.
if the choice were not
always between mercy
or forgiveness,

laundry would dry
completely. if the body was
more than wood jarred
in brine,

the moon would stay
isosceles. if I could diagram
the grammar of a motive,

I could empty
this shoebox. if geometry
were no longer
in the arc but the meter,

i would pray to this round shape
i’ve locked
in my hands.
if the lilies were not
bearing their stamens

like wolves,
is this the only way to be
happy?

 

www.simplesharebuttons.comSHARE THIS POST
FacebookTwittertumblrEmail
elegyghostslyricmotherpoempushcart 2014surreal
Share Tweet

Hafizah Geter

Hafizah Geter is a South Carolina native currently living in Brooklyn, New York and a Cave Canem Fellow. The recipient of a 2012 Amy Award from Poets & Writers and a 2013 Blacksmith House emerging writer, her poems have appeared or are forthcoming in RHINO, Drunken Boat, Vinyl, H.O.W Journal, Columbia: A Journal of Literature and Art, Linebreak, Narrative Magazine, and Gulf Coast, among others. She is a poetry editor at Phantom Limb Press. www.hafizahgeter.com

You Might Also Like

  • Poems

    Affirmation

  • Poems

    Utopia

  • Poems

    Flying United

Subscribe

Blunderbuss is going print! Subscriptions are available via our Patreon page:

patreon-button.png

Donate

Donate to Blunderbuss and help support up-and-coming writers & artists.

Keep up with Blunderbuss

Follow @BlunderbussMag
Follow on Tumblr
Follow on rss

Latest

  • In the Opposites’ World

  • The History of Bodies

  • Shots in the Dark

  • Rascal House Blues, Pt. IV

  • After Homecoming

Like us on Facebook

Latest Tweets

Tweets by @BlunderbussMag
  • Home
  • About
  • Contact
  • Submissions

ABOUT

We are Blunderbuss Magazine, a web magazine of arts, culture, and politics, an ordnance of fire and improvisation. What ties together these essays, stories, poems, photographs, comics, and other bits of aesthetic shrapnel is a common attitude of visceral humanism. We aim for earnest noise. We want to splash in the mud of lived experience, to battle for a radical empathy, and to provide a megaphone to howling assertions of human subjectivity.

MASTHEAD

  • Editor-in-Chief – Travis American
  • Managing – Niral Shah
  • Fiction – Sara Nović
  • Art Director – Yvonne Martinez
  • Poetry – Sam Ross
  • Art – Terence Trouillot
  • Comics – Ellis Rosen
  • Senior – Alex Howe
  • At Large – Kevin T.S. Tang
  • Pictures – Lauren E. Wool
  • Contributing – Meredith Fraser
  • Web – Hayley Thornton-Kennedy

Subscribe & Support

Blunderbuss has made the jump to print! Subscriptions are available via our Patreon page:

patreon-button.png



Donate to Blunderbuss and help support up-and-coming writers & artists:

SEARCH

© 2014 Blunderbuss Magazine. All rights reserved.