Sara Hovda

Night’s Grammar

At dusk, I waited
with my finger on the trigger of a .22
readied for the cloud of starlings

to break. Let what I say
be said with conviction—this is
what language asks.

The fault my body carries:
I could barely perform son.
My father, dying already

from cancer he couldn’t see,
shouted in the hayloft,
stoked the feathered shadows.

Language longs for truth
past understanding,
how I wished for the bullet

to find sky beyond wings.
So what of the waiting?
A moment

drips like the slowest sweat
down my forehead.
When my heart twitched, my shadow

winced against the gravel driveway,
and I thought of forgiveness
as I fired.

Language finds its limit,
the farthest along the road
I could see clearly.

Beyond, all was incoherence:
there would’ve been a bird
limp in my mannish hands,

and if I had wrapped it
loose in newspaper,
lit the burn barrel, country pyre,

to make sense of that first
undeserved death,
for which I was called man,

there would’ve been rumination
and ash.
But I couldn’t find the body.

So tonight, lying alone
as a woman, studying this memory
like looking down a rifle’s open sight,

through the window
the quickening darkness
bears my first longing:

girl
sheathed in yellow floral dress
wanders the family land

as the sky loses its vision,
when my father’s presence can be felt
far off, in the way one hears birdsong.

Old Homeplace, its earthy-sweet smell.
Returning for the first time
with words that fit the truth I knew,

I can say this
and believe in language
fully, if not forever.

I was your daughter
concealed in purpling darkness
calling.

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Sara Hovda is a transgender woman from rural Minnesota. She currently attends the MFA program at UC-Riverside while also working as an online entertainer. Her poems have appeared or are forthcoming in magazines such as Passages North, Nimrod and Shō Poetry Journal, among others.