Holding

By: Jasmine Marshall Armstrong

A Father Holding his Dead Daughter’s Hand Crushed Beneath Their Home After the Turkish Quake

The way he slipped his hand in hers, you knew

He’d done it a thousand nights—no more—

Countless times after she woke

among the boulders of blue dark nightmares.

So many times, her thin fingers unfurled

In his own, shy ferns that find peace

in the night air, when every living being grows

or regenerates, cells dividing, carrying

the familial map, the way every child’s body

carries the parents, and multitudes of ancestors,

enough to number the stars, perhaps—

but that night, he held her hand knowing

the cleaving of the earth, a fault-filled world

had stopped the journey of all those cells,

carrying the Jacob’s Ladders of DNA,

the foibles and fierce beauty of all who were

in her and made her had stopped—

the journey’s cord severed, its rope slack

as the daughter’s pulseless wrist

her father could not leave there—

beneath the rubble.

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Jasmine Marshall Armstrong’s poetry is dedicated to capturing the difficult times in which we live and has been influenced by the grit and glamor of growing up working class in California. A journalist, teacher, and humanities scholar in addition to being a poet, she has published poetry in Typishly, American Magazine, Poets Reading the News, In Parenthesis, Sojourners Magazine, Askew, “We Are Beat,” the National Beat Poets Anthology and numerous other anthologies. She holds an MFA in Poetry and an MA in Humanities.