One Year After My Dying Father and I Stop Speaking to Each Other Again By Eugenia Leigh
One Year After My Dying Father and I Stop Speaking to Each Other Again
Eugenia LeighSomeone on the internet is mourning
her dad—that old goat—with a goldmineof anecdotes. Scraps of fondness I scrape off
her tweet—his beef wellington, her frogs. I wantmy frown-scored mouth loaded with her clean vocabulary
of love. The way she holds her father’s hand, no pinchof humiliation. Like the time I saw a teenager
sitting on her father’s lap. How I couldn’ttake my eyes off the alarming purity of it.
How my mouth dried at the sight like I had been drinkingthe wrong water all this time. When I pull
the ocherous leaves from my thirsty pothos, it istoo easy. No satisfactory rip. Too ready
to let go. I covet the reels of the lucky ones going onabout their dead. Everyone I have lost
I have lost before the end.
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This poem appeared in Bianca by Eugenia Leigh, published by Four Way Books, 2023. (Available direct from Four Way Books • Also on: Amazon • Bookshop)
DESCRIPTION
““I thought I forgave you,” Eugenia Leigh tells the specter of her father in Bianca. “Then I took root and became / someone’s mother.” Leigh’s gripping second collection introduces us to a woman managing marriage, motherhood, and mental illness as her childhood abuse resurfaces in the light of “this honeyed life.” Leigh strives to reconcile the disconnect between her past and her present as she confronts the inherited violence mired in the body’s history. As she “choose[s] to be tender to [her] child—a choice / [her] mangled brain makes each day,” memories arise, asking the mother in her to tend, also, to the girl she once was. Thus, we meet her manic alter ego, whose history becomes the gospel of Bianca: “We all called her Bianca. My fever, my havoc, my tilt.” These poems recover and reconsider Leigh’s girlhood and young adulthood with the added context of PTSD and Bipolar Disorder. They document the labyrinth of a woman breaking free from the cycle of abuse, moving from anger to grief, from self-doubt to self-acceptance. Bianca is ultimately the testimony of one woman’s daily recommitment to this life. To living. “I expected to die much younger than I am now,” Leigh writes, in awe of the strangeness of now, of “every quiet and colossal joy.”” (Source)
ABOUT EUGENIA LEIGH
Eugenia Leigh is a Korean American poet and the author of Bianca (Four Way Books, 2023) and Blood, Sparrows and Sparrows (Four Way Books, 2014). Eugenia serves as a Poetry Editor at The Adroit Journal. (Source)
Read more poems by Eugenia Leigh • Find books by this poet on Amazon • Bookshop • Follow on Instagram • Twitter • Bluesky • Website • Or view my library
ENDNOTES
- Explore other works in pursuit of: grief • envy • father • Or browse the index
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