"Prayer for the meat-clung bone" by Sadia Hassan | Arts + Literature Laboratory | Madison Contemporary Arts Center

"Prayer for the meat-clung bone" by Sadia Hassan

 

Prayer for the meat-clung bone

 

God, when you raise the dead,


raise him last. Let him rot

 

a little longer than the others.


Let him panic as his memory

 

staggers towards the youngest of us.


Gag his grave with the milk-sour

 

stench of girls, the hot and


damp heat of small mouths

 

fervent for a mother who sees


a knife and thinks: brother.

 

And before he can beg sister, sister!

And before he can plead forgive me?

 

Pack his mouth with flint.


Set fire to every cottony tooth,

 

tongue and tender meat-clung


bone. If you ran red the dirt

 

drawls of our girlhood,


if you gave language

 

to your girl slaves,


allow the pebbles

 

to gather in praise


of the scorpion’s


singing sting.


 

"Prayer for the meat-clung bone" originally appeared in The Rumpus.

About the Author

Portrait of Sadia Hassan

Sadia Hassan is the author of Enumeration (Akashic Books, 2020), part of the New-Generation African Poets chapbook set. Hassan has received fellowships from Hedgebrook, the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference, and the Mesa Refuge. You can find more of her work in Longreads, Hayden’s Ferry Review, and the American Academy of Poets Poem-A-day. She is a former Jay C. and Ruth Halls fellow at the Wisconsin Institute for Creative Writing. 


September 2024

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