Origin Story
At twenty-two, my father
found an egg in his throat,
smooth as a stone.
It grew and grew, a bad tenant
nested in the apartment
of his thyroid, and my father
said nothing about it.
Those days, my mother
chain-smoked filtered Camels,
hiding her sadness under ashtrays
heaped with ruined ends.
They married, legend has it,
so he could hand off
the burden of speech
to someone—anyone—else.
But when, at last, the doctor
named it, my mother
stubbed out her flame
and would not light it again
for many years. But the egg
hatched, its fledgling flown
like a sheyd—a precocious demon
winging it into a world
built on making up
for lost time. All was well
for a while.
Then I was born.
found an egg in his throat,
smooth as a stone.
It grew and grew, a bad tenant
nested in the apartment
of his thyroid, and my father
said nothing about it.
Those days, my mother
chain-smoked filtered Camels,
hiding her sadness under ashtrays
heaped with ruined ends.
They married, legend has it,
so he could hand off
the burden of speech
to someone—anyone—else.
But when, at last, the doctor
named it, my mother
stubbed out her flame
and would not light it again
for many years. But the egg
hatched, its fledgling flown
like a sheyd—a precocious demon
winging it into a world
built on making up
for lost time. All was well
for a while.
Then I was born.
Hannah Silverstein (she/her) is a graduate of the MFA Program for Writers at Warren Wilson College. Her poems have appeared or are forthcoming in Dialogist, Cider Press Review, LEON Literary Review, Whale Road Review, Glass: A Journal of Poetry, Terroir Review, The Ekphrastic Review, SWWIM Every Day, and The New Guard. She lives in Vermont.
Art: A Pink Cactus, oil on paper, Paulina Swietliczko