Ascension of the Blessed Child

By Elizabeth Shanaz

In an alternate dimension

where my luck has pruned to wretched

it is my father who,

sleepless for days,

is crashing fingernails against felled stone

gathering my pieces into a thing fashioned into a bag.

Lifting it to the sky,

daring the world to say they didn’t see.

Affirming my personhood.

Handing me to Allah himself.

 

In the fable of another world

where my luck has husked to shelling,

no parent alive to find me.

it is another girl’s father who,

delirious, eyes amphibious lenses of blood,

pulls the Excalibur of my faint breath from stone.

lifts me to the sky while standing on a

mountain of ruin,

of all of our ruin,

announcing to the world that my heart beats.

Declaring that Allah is the greatest.

 

Elizabeth Shanaz is a poet and lawyer based in New York. Her books include TRAUMA: A Collection of Short Stories (Shanti Arts 2017), Nothing You Could Do (Bruk Out Media 2020), and Waiting for a Name (Shanti Arts 2023).