“MY DADDIES HAVE VOICES LIKE BACHELORS, LIKE CASTIGATORS & CROONERS…” by Tiana Clark

by Tiana Clark / Tuesday, 15 October 2019 / Published in Uncategorized

Daughter, you make me shudder, make music of my bones, don’t you?
Yes, like castanets. The best blood of my blood, soft blood, boiled

blood of not knowing, bright blood is still in you now, blushing
scarlet cells blossoming in your face, plasma rich as juicy figs, cut

open & gleaming. Muscling that dark abyss, I am the jumbo starfish
skimming and slurping the wounded deep-sea floor. To get close

enough—I came to Nashville once. I wanted to feel the friction
and fiction of having a daughter there. I watched you working

at the restaurant near the replica of the Parthenon with the massive
statue of Athena burning hot and fat and gold inside like a secret sun.

I didn’t sit in your section, but near it. I saw your almond eyes
(my eyes). I saw your nose (my nose). The pressure of my face

in your face, barometric. The first words I could not gather
were on your cheeks, passerines perched on telephone wires,

soundless black ovals and lines like unsaid musical notes on a scale.
I said nothing as you passed by swaying dirty martinis in your hands

aglow like a censer, perfume of blue cheese & briny olive juice, murky
as the memory, strained as the jade distance between us. I was the last

guest at the bar, still pushing my slick steak across the white china,
knife clinking, carving the wet meat into smaller pieces of meat: dark

animal juice, gristle tug, tough then delicate tearing—I was stalling.
I didn’t want to eat it. I didn’t want another reason to get up & leave

you. You walked by me again, I whispered & mouthed slowly: olive juice.
Didn’t you watch my greasy lips as I said it? Almost looked like I said it,

huh? Dear Daughter, say it in the mirror & that’s me saying it, ok?
Would that, could that mouthing (of silent love or persona love

or mimetic love or epistolary love, or your pain-is-misplaced-here
kind of love or even the dinging repetition of daddyless love

or any kind of damn love love ever be enough? Or, I didn’t know
how to finish this poem love and I’ve been editing it for years love

until Jessica Jacobs made me rip it up love across a table until I could
see the scaffolding until I could see the secret of my poem love, which

is—father, daughter, reader, lover—I don’t have to tell you everything.

*The title is borrowed from a line in Terrance Hayes’ poem “ARSPOETICA# 789.”

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About Tiana Clark

Tiana Clark is the author of the poetry collection, I Can’t Talk About the Trees Without the Blood (University of Pittsburgh Press, 2018), winner of the 2017 Agnes Lynch Starrett Prize, and Equilibrium (Bull City Press, 2016), selected by Afaa Michael Weaver for the 2016 Frost Place Chapbook Competition. Clark is a 2019 National Endowment for the Arts Literature Fellow and a recipient of a 2019 Pushcart Prize, as well as a winner of the 2017 Furious Flower’s Gwendolyn Brooks Centennial Poetry Prize and 2015 Rattle Poetry Prize. She was the 2017-2018 Jay C. and Ruth Halls Poetry Fellow at the Wisconsin Institute of Creative Writing. Clark is the recipient of scholarships and fellowships to the Bread Loaf Writers' Conference, Sewanee Writers' Conference, and Kenyon Review Writers Workshop. She is a graduate of Vanderbilt University (M.F.A) and Tennessee State University (B.A.) where she studied Africana and Women's studies. Her writing has appeared in or is forthcoming from The New Yorker, Poetry Magazine, VQR, Tin House Online, Kenyon Review, BuzzFeed News, American Poetry Review, New England Review, Oxford American, Best New Poets 2015, and elsewhere. She teaches creative writing at Southern Illinois University at Edwardsville.