Tuesday poem #177 : Farid Matuk : My Daughter Unbound In the Foot Fault

say you're the steady light impulse to start
a spinning in our soft heads so we wake
each the queen the happy ghost at the halls
of the riverboat or maybe I am
the martyr takes her state inside herself
insourcing a claim to life you can take
riding upon the face of the waters
will you in your time account for any
war just enough in as much as a feast
photographed hangs framed in time in a house
pellets of salt to soften its water
palms in their stands siphon its water runs
along air’s fibers in prisms a lamp
A-10s circle offering ground support
let’s don’t lose mothers running in superfluity
whose clean teeth ring crystal teal and white who
go afeared of time in writerly ways
the sky behaves itself over bamboo
grows wild or bedded with river stones hauled
come to rest their smoothing ends but not the
infinitive work a daughter to run
away with water as one of her rhymes

Farid Matuk is the author of This Isa Nice Neighborhood (Letter Machine Editions) and My Daughter La Chola (Ahsahta Press).

the Tuesday poem is curated by rob mclennan