Have a daughter, call her Asylum.

Have a daughter, call her Better

Late. Have a daughter.

 

Call her Christian. Call her

Beget-by-Fate. She is the called-

back, she is a dead horse,

 

she is the one arisen and she

is lovely. She holds your hand

until it purples. She twists

 

her hair until it’s snakes.

She is born, she is born,

she is born. She whispers

 

to you—always late and

never better. Always in

the lake and shining. She is

 

your daughter, you beget

her. Her teeth are even,

and small, and they wait.

 

*

 

Annah Browning is a Ph.D. candidate in the Program for Writers at The University of Illinois-Chicago, and the author of a chapbook, The Marriage (Horse Less Press, 2013). Her poems have recently appeared in Verse Daily, Indiana Review, Willow Springs, Boulevard, Radar Poetry, and other journals. She is an editor of Grimoire, an online literary magazine of witchy and the weird.