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  • Writer's pictureMarías at Sampaguitas

Poem by Robin Sinclair

And The Wolf.


A fragment of the story was muttered over dinner

when she was twelve,

her aunt, wine-drunk, pulled away before

berating her father

and an argument on her sixteenth birthday,

his guilty lips speaking into a white coffee mug

admitted the rest.

She hid her mother's photograph for a year after,

each day becoming more like him than the last.


And She the Mother, the Martyr of Lore,

basked in the white light of memory.


By twenty, her hands stopped shaking from fear

of who either of them could be

and she'd made peace with the echos of him

bouncing off of ceilings above

distractionless beds.

She imagined the days following her mother's death

as if she'd been there,

the silent decision and

the penance to be paid by those that took her. Beyond empathy,

there would be embrace.


And He the Father, a Wolf of Shade

consumed the light and hardened her.


On Valentines Day, when she was twenty-two,

she held his helplessness in her hand and listened

to him fade on monitors.


And She, wrapped in shadows,

became the Vengeance he once was.




Robin Sinclair is a queer, genderqueer writer of mixed heritage and mixed emotions, currently on the road reading from their debut book of poetry, Letters To My Lover From Behind Asylum Walls (Cosmographia Books 2018). Find Robin at RobinSinclairBooks.com and on Twitter (@Ghost_Of_Mary). 

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