There Is Much To Forgive
Emily R. Daniel
A Golden Shovel
“I lock you in an American Sonnet that is part prison, part panic closet.”
— Terrence Hayes
There is much to forgive of my childhood self: I
ignored every closed door, every fixed lock
and entered at will, greeted by disappointment. You
let me in, but we both knew I wasn’t welcome in
your room, your conversation, your arms an
opening I’d forced like a real American
and what can I build of this if not a sonnet
my daughter will refuse to try and understand, in that
she thinks poetry is impossible to make sense of, that its way with words is
meant to mislead, excluding her from it is part
of why she may never seek to know me and how I am prison-
er to this mode of meaning-making, this map of my mind, part
and parcel of me before her, surrounding her, and that is when the panic
sets in—is it my hand or hers fumbling for the exit from this closet?
Emily R. Daniel's chapbook, Life Line, was selected as a winner of the 2020 Celery City Chapbook Prize. Emily is a Best of the Net nominee, and her work can be found in The Penn Review, Beloit Poetry Journal, Waxwing, Porter House Review, Crab Orchard Review, and The Massachusetts Review, among others. Emily holds an MFA in Poetry from Western Michigan University, where she served as Poetry Editor for Third Coast Magazine. For more information, visit www.emilyrdaniel.com.