qarrtsiluni

by Peg Duthie

I have torched battalions of straw men
in my quest to spin an ending to my liking.
I have cajoled seeds into uprooting secrets
before they are even drowned or buried.
I have fleeced both witches and sailors
and clothed empresses with newsprint veils.
I have given nothing away, although
many who partake of my measures fail
to recognize that everything bears a price.
I learned this from you. Your prints form a ghost
under everything I touch, a phantom
under every map I sketch, and once
I cease to care about what left’s to lose, I
will free you from the lump lodged in my throat.

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Peg Duthie (website) shares a house in Nashville, Tennessee, with a small piano, a large dog, and a drawerful of knives. She blogs at Chrysanthemum.

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by Peg Duthie

At last year’s service, she wore espadrilles
fashioned from a jacket she used to wear
to other people’s weddings. So many vows
polluted with the ashes of bridges. If
she believed in God, she’d have to berate Him
even more than she already does each time
she scrapes the sludge of sloughed-off oaths
from her well-tanned soul, or when she trims
cookie-cutter blasphemies out of her mind’s
ruthless replaying of her sins. Sloppy work,
she tells Him. I can’t love anyone
proud of setting me up to fail. Yet, the years
she pretended the holidays weren’t hers,
she felt like an incomplete book, like a spine
losing its glue, pages dropping away
before their time. So now, each fall,
she brings home apples and honey, and wears
fabric shoes to shul the following week, chanting
a counterpoint within her mind
at every iteration of the Kaddish.

Download the podcast

Peg Duthie (website) shares a house in Nashville, Tennessee, with a small piano, a large dog, and a drawerful of knives. She blogs at Chrysanthemum.

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