Two Daughters

It’s #tbt! Enjoy this great one from SWWIM Every Day‘s archives!

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When there are two
daughters, one is soft
one is swift
one can stretch
her face to contain
honey or humor
saline, a bone graft
disdain.
One cannot bend
but knows her place
the curtains
the floorboard’s tongue-
in-groove, the hearthstone.

When there are two
daughters there are two
moons, both sickle-celled
and fawn-eyed.
One that sings
one that scolds.
Both hold their breath
under bridges.

Sometimes there are two
rivers cutting landscape
flooding farms
sometimes fire strides forth
on two fronts
sometimes two stars
orbit each other, but these
reflect each other’s light
and these are not
two daughters.

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Emily Pérez is the author of What Flies Want, winner of the Iowa Prize and finalist for a Colorado Book Award, and she co-edited the anthology, The Long Devotion: Poets Writing Motherhood, also a Colorado Book Award finalist. A CantoMundo fellow and Ledbury Critic, her poems have appeared in journals including Kenyon Review, Copper Nickel, Prairie Schooner, and Poetry. She teaches high school in Denver, where she lives with her family. Her next book, Head Full of Clocks, is forthcoming from BOA Editions.