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One Who Pierces the Valley

June 1, 2022 By Isabelle Doyle

One Who Pierces the Valley

Your sister was like twilight coming out of your mother, the day so impossible your mother’s body became it. Your mother was there with her black hair and her face an ambulance siren, and the doctor who tried to deliver her, and the nurses, and the eventual midwife on the tailend of thirty-two hours who pushed her sleeve up to her elbow and reached in to turn her over, slide her slick mewling and half-lavender out of the hot wet into the sterilized holding pen of her new planet, and your father by your mother’s shoulders with his useless face changing every second. Your sister turning over and over. Your sister hit her skull on something hard inside your mother. All anger was aimless and so necessarily static. All bodies are bloody. The stroke of God’s hand—your sister’s evening-soft head propped on a whip-thin crook, wheeled through the blankness of the hospital into wadded-gum-wan January sun over the dirty world. You too moved through the blues of her body while your sister took radios apart and put them back together perfectly. Your sister traded stocks online when she was like, fucking nine. Your sister wielded a graphing calculator like a tiny-fingered gladiator. You used to hiss at her when she bumped into you and broke dishes in the kitchen. She broke dishes because she was clumsy on the right side of her body. Your sister’s body was a story that kept getting told. Everybody who met her tried to tell it to her. The physical therapist was pale-haired and Christian and careless. The counselor at the community center fell in love with your mother so she had to find another. The girls who found her were ruthless and she didn’t try to find others. You never lost track of it. You never stood in for her. Wherever you left her, you knew they would find her there. Your body kept leaving her body alone. She never ran away from them because she was their friend. They held your sister’s head under the sink and dyed the back of her hair pink. They pushed her into the wall and told her to push back. They said hi when they saw you and you said hi back. They told everybody your sister couldn’t piss in the toilet seat. They spit in your sister’s milk.

About Isabelle Doyle

Isabelle Doyle (she/her) is the author of O'Riley, a poetry chapbook published by Jacar Press in November 2021, which was then nominated for a Pushcart Prize. She is the winner of the 2021 Jacar Press Chapbook Competition, a semi-finalist for the 2020 Tomaž Šalamun Poetry Prize, and the winner of the 2018 Frances Mason Harris Prize at Brown University. Her poems have been published in Typo Magazine, DIALOGIST, Map Literary, The Chiron Review, The Madison Review, Susurrus, Bluestem Magazine, The Eunoia Review, The Red Eft Review, Cargoes, Street Light Press, Thin Noon, The Round, and Clerestory. She is currently a Graduate Council Fellow and Truman Capote Literary Scholar at the MFA in Creative Writing Program at the University of Alabama in Tuscaloosa.

Artist Credit:

Brett J Barr is an artist/ tattooist, born in Easton Pennsylvania. He grew up in Daytona Beach, moved to Orlando FL in 1997 and now resides in Chuluota, FL. Aside from tattooing at Built 4 Speed Tattoo in Orlando, Brett enjoys many different art forms such as graphite, charcoal, paint, pen and ink, mixed media/ graphic design, woodworking miniatures and studies classical guitar.

Contacts:
brettjbarr@yahoo.com
Facebook/ Brett J Barr
Instagram/ brettjbarrtattoos
Shop Insta/ built4speedtattoos
built4speedtattoos.com/brettjbarr

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