Caylin Capra-Thomas
Contest - 1st Place
Caylin Capra-Thomas’s second chapbook Inside My Electric City is available through YesYes Books. The recipient of the Louisville Literary Arts Association’s 2016 Writer’s Block Prize in Poetry, and Yemassee’s 2016 Nonfiction Prize, her work has appeared in journals including New England Review, Crazyhorse, Salt Hill, Willow Springs, Verse Daily, and elsewhere. She lives in Gainesville.
Bigfoot to Her Daughter
All is mind. We comb our hair with stiffened
hair. Do not think we are immune to vanity—
that I have you is a vanity, codified, passed
along like an heirloom or a cough. Expect
to be pushed out. We are alone here. Soon
you will be so completely. If the fig tree’s
fruit must fall and rot, so must the fruit
of figment. There, there little glimmer.
It can’t all be so personal; god and time
are one, and both make daughters motherless.
When you can’t reach to groom your back,
abrade it on the base of a scrub pine. Trees
are not as stoic as they seem. One day
you too will be reduced to what you leave
behind—footfall, fragrance—then recede
back into the mind that made you. Perhaps
it is mine, or perhaps it is that of the sea,
the womb of all that is real and all
that the real imagines. I feel us becoming
something like seaweed—egg-sacked
tangle of self, toothed and knotted wrack.
Forever children fantastic—never snarling,
always snarled, a fearsome love and ruin
only ever brushing against the world.
hair. Do not think we are immune to vanity—
that I have you is a vanity, codified, passed
along like an heirloom or a cough. Expect
to be pushed out. We are alone here. Soon
you will be so completely. If the fig tree’s
fruit must fall and rot, so must the fruit
of figment. There, there little glimmer.
It can’t all be so personal; god and time
are one, and both make daughters motherless.
When you can’t reach to groom your back,
abrade it on the base of a scrub pine. Trees
are not as stoic as they seem. One day
you too will be reduced to what you leave
behind—footfall, fragrance—then recede
back into the mind that made you. Perhaps
it is mine, or perhaps it is that of the sea,
the womb of all that is real and all
that the real imagines. I feel us becoming
something like seaweed—egg-sacked
tangle of self, toothed and knotted wrack.
Forever children fantastic—never snarling,
always snarled, a fearsome love and ruin
only ever brushing against the world.
“ ‘Bigfoot to Her Daughter’ is part of a longer series of poems inspired by cryptids and other strange phenomena. ”
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