sonnet for sam langford #5

you tried to breathe as your hands drowned in their salt-cured prayers
while your father stood over you & considered the rum-rotted thought
of how much hurt would be enough, as if it were your body & not
your mind that was plastic. but you’re never more porous than as a child
& you took so much from your father’s touch: with every punch you grew
drunker while he sobered up . . . enough to brush the salt rind from his fists.
your father invested in a cosmogony of agony.
he tried to tell you this, but split lips spilt out improperly spelt words
with slurred & churned-around syllables. 		you learned language was a limit
-ation & that the body remembers what you have to forget:
violence is a lineage & your father’s hands were brought back
from the sea. & that sometimes the hold still holds your family’s hands, &
sometimes you can feel your father’s hands curing beneath your own, bringing you
to the thought: you’re only possible because of histories that hurt.

Read more from Issue 22.1.