Beth Ann Fennelly
I Provide for You, Boy Child, Like God

and like God, I will cast you out.

  

Your eyes blue as a drowned thing.

  

Your harshest lesson:

you are no part of me. 

  

Learning that

will cost you ages in which

your eyes will take on the human color: grief.

  

Coming to words won’t even help you

name you suffering.

  

You will embrace

false idols.

  

Yet those women can let you

back in that primal crawl space

no more than I can.

 
Found In Volume 36, No. 06
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Beth Ann Fennelly
About the Author

Beth Ann Fennelly is the author of six books, including Heating & Cooling: 52 Micro-Memoirs, forthcoming from W. W. Norton in fall of 2017.  She's the Poet Laureate of Mississippi, and teaches at the University of Mississippi.