This selection, chosen by Guest Editor t.r. san, is from Apostasies by Holli Carrell (Perugia Press 2025).
JEPHTHAH’S DAUGHTER
Your father tenders your life. You yearn simply for tenderness.
Nameless daughter. Known only as belonging to Him. He
who grips your loamy little-rooted life in his palm, wrenches it
then releases. In myth and scripture, a daughter’s slaughter:
never slaughter. Just strategy to achieve the desired objects of war.
You, a holy daughter made holier. The wood laid. The fire,
a knife. Your sacrum set on the altar. I imagine the moment
you understand no angel’s voice breaks the heavens. No
celestial arm holds your father’s blade back. Your life and death
trivial as a bowl of red berries, spilling on a wooden table—
scattering at his feet.
Holli Carrell (she/they) was born and raised in Salt Lake City, Utah and now lives in the Midwest, where she recently completed her PhD in Creative Writing with a Graduate Certificate in Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies at the University of Cincinnati. A 2024-2025 Taft Research Center Dissertation Fellow, her poetry has appeared or is forthcoming in Gulf Coast, The North American Review, 32 Poems, Poetry Northwest, Ninth Letter, The Journal, Bennington Review, and Salt Hill, among other journals.
t.r. san is a poet and translator currently based on Gadigal land, with recent work found in minor literature[s], The Cincinnati Review, HAD, Smokelong Quarterly, The Offing, &c. read & reach @thoushallkill on Twitter, or trsan.neocities.org.
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