Lord forgive me, I am my father’s child:
cunning and arrogant with beauty. Daughterprince.
Adam’s first. His sweet apple. I have his eyes.
No man beneath God tells me what to do.
Sly and nimble, I was called “mischief”
more than my own name, and so when I caught
Adam smoking a coveted pack of cigarettes,
he rewards me with admiration.
Him with my obedience. My girlness bound
beneath overalls to Momma’s disappointment.
What she couldn’t corral beneath a dress or brush
back into even barrettes, she sent to Adam.
We exchange glances, laugh with our eyes.
She doesn’t get it and how could she…? I am eight
and can only see her for her gender.
“Woman” meaning “loneliness is the animal I know best”.
She’s never been a girl; never sent beneath the yoke.
The feminine urge to be my father’s best boi,
I boy’d better than the other boys—peed standing up;
won every game of ‘nutcheck’; shot my first kill by ten;
caught trout by mouths at twelve; could spit a perfect
parabola in the air. Feral against the demure, I braid
my hair like Queen Latifah in Set It Off. Handsome
for the boymouth singing Smino. Clever as I think I am,
I could not stop the body’s machinery.
Mammogenesis begins me again.
Lot’s wife is a common story; a tale told from mothers
to daughters about disobedience. Shame measured in salt.
I refused the mercy of my sister’s honesty
when she told our father’s betrayal would happen.
My girlness treated like that of a fox. Deceitful.
O Father, I have been a girl all my life.
I have no other history.
No other master but you.
I.S. Jones is an American / Nigerian poet and essayist. Her works have appeared or are forthcoming in Guernica, Washington Square Review, LA Review of Books, Prairie Schooner and elsewhere. She is currently an instructor with Brooklyn Poets and the 2023 Bread Loaf Rona Jaffe Scholar in poetry. She is the 2024 Artist-In-Resident as Northwestern University with the Black Arts Consortium. Her chapbook Spells of My Name (2021) is out with Newfound. Currently, she serves as a Senior Editor of Poetry Northwest, where her column “The Legacy Suite”, a 3-part interview series celebrating debut poets, resides. I.S. is at work on her debut collection of poems
Photo by melvin Ankrah on Unsplash