United States, (b. 1964)
To the Pig: An Oath
- To do no harm beyond need and not to hurt.
- To catch you up by the leg,
- to be that body of doubt you denied always.
- To graze your lifeline,
- tell the future only once.
- To sharpen the knife till it’s thin as a leaf.
- To boil water, hide the rope,
- to wear the scent of an unlocked gate.
- To quiet the bucket’s handle with a rag.
- To let you eat in silence.
- To compare your broad back to fresh lumber
- and muscles to spring bulbs. To wait
- to say your name aloud and clot your ears with sense.
- To prepare my arms, to reshape fear.
- To catch your intelligent eye with mine.
- To stand in the widening circle
- and soak my boots to the ankle.
- To scrape wiry hair, to keep water boiling.
- To hang the shell of you in waves of smoke.
- To unpack a pot the size of your thoughts
- and jars enough for the jewels of your insides.
- To linger over pale pink ones.
- To force hands in. To bloody my apron,
- to isolate every fracture and pour salt over.
- To break bones to go deeper, to empty my mind
- to make a tent of you, to balance the knife, to say
- your eyes are white as milk so almost blue.
- To bring the wheel of my attention
- and quick hands to the smallest bones
- that articulated jumping. To tie
- a second apron on. To wear myself out. To find
- you blooming suds, to be the one to have fed you,
- whose abundance is proof of my love.
About the Poet:
Lia Purpura, United States (b. 1964), is a poet, essayist and educator. She is the recipient of four Pushcart Prizes. Purpura is the author of four collections of poems: King Baby, Stone Sky Lifting, The Brighter the Veil, It Shouldn’t Have Been Beautiful, four collections of essays: Increase, On Looking, Rough Likeness, and All the Fierce Tethers and one collection of translations Poems of Grzegorz Musial: Berliner Tagebuch and Taste of Ash.
Her poems and essays have appeared in AGNI, The Antioch Review, DoubleTake, FIELD, The Georgia Review, The Iowa Review, Orion Magazine, The New Republic, The New Yorker, The Paris Review, Parnassus: Poetry in Review, Southern Review, and many other magazines.
A graduate of Oberlin College and the Iowa Writers’ Workshop where she was a Teaching/Writing Fellow in Poetry, Purpura is currently Writer-in-Residence at University of Maryland, Baltimore County in Baltimore, Maryland. She is also on the faculty of the Rainier Writing Workshop Low-Residency MFA Program in Tacoma, Washington. [DES-01/22]
Additional information:
- Lia Purpura – https://twitter.com/liapurpura
- Lia Purpura – Web – http://liapurpura.com/