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    the first time i see my father
    it is at the nosebleed dusk of his funeral

    i travel 7,000 miles for a photograph
     — his body’s a half-lit cathedral of bones

    here chopin is a rosebud clutched between
        the gondolier’s lips; an étude’s silk

    around the guillotine of a transparent
    valance. a tesserae of water-lilied notes

                the final shell of a martyr’s death-wish

    at the window across the street, a woman with her
    body of murano glass — enters like an epiphany

    her dress of floodtides, waves & waves
    of Armenian lace; a photograph of Venice,

    its bridges with their unhinged mandibles open
    like a language as naked as this city of cemeteries

    with its cobalt bottlenecks, quicksilver canals & all
    of its music swaying between waiting & wilting

     

    Scherezade Siobhan is an Indo-Roma writer, psychologist, and an interpreter of mirrors. Her work has appeared or is forthcoming in Queen Mob’s Teahouse, Fruita Pulp, Cordite Poetry Review, Black & BLUE, Winter Tangerine, The Nervous Breakdown, The Harpoon Review, DIAGRAM, Wasafiri, Literary Orphans, and elsewhere. She is the author of Bone Tongue (Thought Catalog Books) and Father, Husband (Salò Press).

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