XX Judgement
In a graveyard, Pluto issues out its banner
Stark with god’s red cross telling me what I already know.
From now on, debts and love now have measure.
A hard candy for every time I punched my brother.
A soured apple for every missed dinner at my mother’s table.
A ray of night cuts through the light and I am alone again
in a bed ever shrinking to the size I allow myself.
I eat the apples and pucker further into my bound shape.
I crack the hard candies that glue themselves to my crowns;
A bitter nourishment weighs in my belly
While everything I have done now curdles:
the price of action. All my solace unravels as a feast.
Copyright © 2021 by Dan Lau. Originally published in Poem-a-Day on August 3, 2021, by the Academy of American Poets.
“The poet, Jesse Galloway, facilitated a group writing exercise using a tarot deck during a Foglifter press staff retreat. She drew the Judgement card and something fired in me. There I was surrounded by my queer community with my family of origin so far away. I wrote this poem in response.”
—Dan Lau
Dan Lau
Dan Lau is a poet, a nonprofit arts administrator at Kundiman and an editor at Foglifter, a queer literary journal and press. He resides on the unceded territory of the Ramaytush Ohlone, also known as San Francisco.