"My best friend's daughter had" and other work by Sam Szanto
My best friend's daughter had
fingers like eyelashes,
toes like lily petals,
she lived in four walls
always, a fairy princess,
a tissue-paper love letter
disintegrating in her skin.
Heart stopped, she dressed
her in silence.
The rabbit
lies across the path,
tawny and tiny,
eyes gouged out.
My son shows me
the dandelion
someone has placed
on its fur.
‘It’s the year of the rabbit,’
he tells me.
Taking his still-smaller hand,
we step around the corpse,
continuing our Sunday walk
up the hill,
the sky heavy
with unspilled rain,
knowing we’ll see the body again,
I pray the wind
won’t have blown the dandelion away.
The Black Poplar
Chacking jackdaws
form a mourning circle,
I kneel before her,
laying hands on her broken torso,
breathing in her heart-shaped leaves’
faint scent of balsam,
stroking fissures and burrs
on the bark which outlasted
two queens, a bracken fungus attack,
both world wars, the lightning strike
which pruned her,
one healthy limb surviving.
Someone takes a selfie
as they are passing.
I wonder if they know
this female hybrid
was the last of her kind.
My daughter said fairies
lived in her branches.
Sam Szanto’s debut poetry pamphlet will be published by Hedgehog Press in 2023. Her poems are published in international journals including 'The North’, 'BODY' and ‘Hybrid Dreich’. She won the 2020 Charroux Poetry Prize and the Twelfth First Writer Poetry Prize. Her short story collection 'If No One Speaks' is published by Alien Buddha Press. Find Sam at samszanto.com and on Twitter: sam_szanto