metamorphosis

~for Pampa (Grandpa/Papa)

              my mother walks up to the casket     pushes
through the bodies     places a domino on his chest
        the Puerto Rican flag side up    a dull red
the flash of a coqui frog’s tongue     the man
with the ponytail       kisses his cheek   before he leaves
     with my mother’s     skin shedded       and a little
boy plucks the strings of a guitar     somewhere
      an iguana is hatching      a granddaughter strokes
   a wooden bullfrog’s     spine    a granddaughter spooning
the sky   in the corner of a     cracked house     behind
     a cracked door       fragments of a granddaughter     play
a tambourine    her blessed      tongue bleeding
      terracotta tapped    by the wings of a   monarch butterfly
somewhere     within the    veins of banana plants
                                           corpses sing to their daughters

Athena Nassar is an Egyptian-American poet and essayist from Atlanta, Georgia. She is an undergraduate student at Emerson College and Interlochen Arts Academy alum. She is the recipient of the 2019 Scholastic National Gold Medal Portfolio Award, an honorable mention in the New York Times Student Review Contest, Lake Effect National Poetry Competition finalist, and Tom Samet High School Fiction Competition winner. Her work has appeared or is forthcoming in The Best Teen Writing of 2019 and elsewhere. Currently, she is a feature writer forFive Cent Sound and Atlas Magazine at Emerson College.