Confessional
“Confessional” by Lizabeth Yandel is the 2nd place winner of the 2023 Sappho Prize for Women Poets, selected by Guest Judge Evie Shockley. We’re honored to share this poem with you.
“When a poem walks unflinchingly into some of poetry’s most clichéd territory — the world of dreams, say, or the trope of confessionalism — and wields image and syntax in ways that nonetheless grip and surprise me, I am instantly a fan. This one uses vivid metaphors and repetition to weave its nightmares and their potential (if unreliable) antidotes into a web of emotions I couldn’t escape.” —Evie Shockley, Guest Judge
Confessional
In childhood nightmares I searched
for a corner to curl into & pray
to god that I would wake. Always
some manner of death was after
me– men with faces I knew, men
with no faces. Once a grinning cowboy
leaned with me against a fence, then
turned red-eyed, pinned me down,
stapled my thighs to the ground
& watched me bleed out in the dirt.
Once, my pastor laid me in his pulpit,
pushed a spoon into my belly, the skin
splaying open like a holy book. Sometimes
I’d play dead; always I ran, eventually. In life,
running was a drug I hid under my tongue
for emergency: the leering eye, the doting eye,
the eye wet with love. A drug can be a medicine
or a death. So can a man. Afternoons, you
rocking on top of me, your thick hair
cradles my fingers like a nest. The chant
of our breath, the church our bodies
make. I hate to say the tight grinding
mouth of panic is there in my chest
even then. Like a good addict, I’ve kept it
secret. But a secret too can be a medicine,
or a death. So, I am building us a corner. Here,
you pray to god in me & I’ll pray to god in you.