Almost Sugar

Cameron Edrich

Like every daughter, I thought of my mother

a virgin. Virgin like

snow angels in the shape of someone young,

not yet impure from the nature of knowing purity.

Everything was so big back in 2017;

Muscles like Athena tucked under Zeus’s skin

a Girl without a mother, and therefore

overflowing with fathers.

I learned to pray with skinned knees bent on

pale sand,

almost sugar. Come God, come into my home

and tell me what’s what. Tell me like a man.

Like every daughter, realizing how a baby was made

was realizing you cannot create purity out of impurity;

instead you are left with something sniveling. Something

surviving.