lineage
bryce emley
because our blood is witness / because we arrive here strangers / and hungry / because my sister
wasn’t the son
our father wanted / she prayed / until her body ached / that it might remake itself /
only our mother
was strong enough / to contain our weakness / her weakness / was being too
strong / to leave / my father
only knew to make us / afraid of settling / into his architecture of
bones / like any father / doesn’t know
how his failures become ours / the myths / our failures build
us into / how afraid I am of becoming him
how afraid I am / of knowing his loneliness / how much
of my love / is what someone else could do
to me / the renditions we make / of our parents’ love
/ the only wounds we can speak of / our mouths
even our breaths are borrowed
Bryce Emley is the author of the prose chapbooks A Brief Family History of Drowning (winner of the 2018 Sonder Press Chapbook Prize, forthcoming) and Smoke and Glass (Folded Word, 2018). He works in marketing at the University of New Mexico Press and is Poetry Editor of Raleigh Review. Read more at bryceemley.com.
