Open Letter To The Soldier

Ela Kini

teach me
how my father killed a man,
how he softened his jaw
into mourning prayer,
tugged a grapefruit from its rind
and swallowed the scent of dying,
staining his teeth with flesh.
he smokes a pack, then tells us
we burn like sage. tells us so easily
that death is all we hold to our name.
in the same breath, my father tells us
he has many faces and often slips on pavement,
scraping his wounds
into womanhood.
my father tells us this of the times in which
he becomes weak, skull curdling
between his own hands, back against water
in preemptive eulogy.
my father cannot swim. when he drowns,
because death is not so easy,
the water sweats into cabernet.
this is another word he does not know how to say.
he shows me my name as it is written.
after the war, my father is no longer illiterate
and that is to say, he has stolen the letters
of every man he has broken into bones
and mouths lost in open prayer. in glass,
we see our reflections, see the ghosts,
see our mirrored mouths hollowed
into o’s. night drowns in the lost body
of my long-returned father.
tongue fermented by old liquor,
my father begs us not to be buried
in a glass casket, not to see himself as ghastly.
with this, I realize the father fears
only his reflection.
similarly, we close his eyes upon death,
and this is a concession of all the ways
in which we are his mirror.
I wonder what we will tell him perched
over his unmoving body. I will beg:
teach me how many ghosts
the parted lips of a corpse
can raise, meager as children; teach me
how hell softens into our sins, how I whisper
hello to the smolders of a graveyard.
in the end, he beckons fate openly,
finishing his war as it had begun.
I learn this is all my father knows: burning.


Ela Kini is a student and poet based in New York.