and a daughter

Dream of a Rotten Daughter

On the night of the day
she buried her mother

her father turned to her
from the grip of an old

photograph, her six-year
dead daddy, swiveled his

bullet head, nailing her
to him with a blood-shot

sniggery eye, then stuck
out his tongue. She woke up

laughing, recognizing
the title of this poem

before she wrote it, there
on the point of that red

wad where he'd honed it all
those years, slipping it in

between her ribs when she
least expected. It was

his label for her from
the time of the big bed

Sunday mornings, and she
between them pretending

oblivion, a balled-
up cuddle to bridge their

unbridgeable gap. Or
(speak truth, oh rotten one)

usurp the I'm-here-first
of that furious eye.

Old news, old news. Tell it
another way. Make it

a Halloween story,
Poe story—ghouls, spiders,

cellars and foul air: Two
dolls in their boxes, laid

side by side like people
bewitched in an iron sleep

and a ghost with a blood
eye and a butcher's tongue

who cut his way into
his daughter's dream to say

of the newly dead, Boo!
I won. I've got her now.

--Alice Friman (from Poetry Daily)