Once

upon beginning banging on beginning,
stars. I wish that I knew how to tell this
right. Once light & dust unlatching from
a center. Once tide. Once loam & edges;

once fishbone & copper, pestle & plow.
Someone made up the word mother
& dog & sing & no. Eventually,
whole stories. What a lucky gift: if

some kid later needs to know a path
through curse, or daughterhood, or whatever
you want to call it, I can give them that.

It’s yours: the staticky punk song, the shortcut over
the blind bridge, the current underneath.
I cannot tell it right, but I can tell this piece.

Sara Fetherolf (she/they) is the author of Via Combusta, winner of the 2021 New American Press Poetry Prize, forthcoming in October 2022. Their debut work of short fiction, “The Place” was the 2021 Iron Horse Long Story award winner, and their poems and essays have appeared in Muzzle, Radar, Indiana Review, The California Journal of Poetics and Plath Profiles, among others. She has an MFA degree from Hunter College, and is currently a PhD candidate in Literature and Creative Writing at University of Southern California, where she is the poetry editor for Gold Line Press. They live in Long Beach, by an unkempt patch of the Pacific Ocean.