To Bear the Right
The picture postcard Goddess on my fridge
has eight, one for every day and then some
random crap will happen, the roof
spring a leak, a dictator stink
I’ll scream or just lie
there in bed, slow draining
blinking red. The dagger
of a parting, tender
box, pins down
stairs in my face,
no way to climb
any rung to pop -
corn stars are a flash
in the pan they fire
up the right
arms, enshrined kitsch in sync.
Copyright © 2025 by Sophia Naz. Originally published in Poem-a-Day on May 3, 2025, by the Academy of American Poets.
“This poem is a snapshot of a woman’s daily life in eight stanzas, a nod to the eight-armed Goddess of the first stanza. I use abrupt turns in the lines to illustrate the breakneck speed [at] which crises, large and small, occur. The woman in the poem is squeezed by dual expectations: the South Asian societal pressure to conform to an idealized womanhood represented by the ‘picture postcard Goddess,’ coupled with the demands of efficiency dictated by a modern American life. She is in a ‘tender box’ from which there is no escape. All this is happening against the backdrop of rising anti-immigrant sentiment contained in the title of the poem, which is an inversion of “the right to bear (arms).” In the present political climate, it is the ‘right’ that has become overbearing, and it is her kind who suffer the consequences.”
—Sophia Naz
Sophia Naz
Sophia Naz is a South Asian American artist, poet, and translator. She is the author of six poetry collections, including Bark Archipelago (Weavers Press, 2023); Open Zero (Yoda Press, 2021); and Shehnaz (Penguin Random House, 2019). She lives in Glen Ellen, California.