Destiny Is Destiny
The recliner, that withered
navy dog, pancaked to accommodate
Esther & her decay. Its adjustable angles
dulled the blades that sliced her guts.
When the doctors said bagels are fine but
only plain, I heard the engine turn cold
in my grandmother’s mind – Boy,
these are some young doctors, and anyway,
what’s a bagel without seeds?
When she screamed I let her
grind my forearm into the Lay-Z-Boy’s
besieged upholstery. I visioned poppy seeds,
demure & black, roll like marbles in cancer-
pocked pinpricks-turned-hydroponics, sprout
elegant curls from split lips, bloom scarlet
triumph at the core of my grandmother.
It was not the pain she hated: it was being
seen in pain. But better a granddaughter
than a husband to witness. And anyway,
why worry him?
I crossed our ocean. She died
while I dined on fried plantains
& pepper sauce. My mother
begged me to come home. I
yanked out the weeds that had grown in
my own guts, ignored her, inner
surfaces clean. In that house of horrors
I loved only Esther
and anyway, she was gone.
I came home—after a fight.
Chris tore my book from my hands
at a Greyhound station in Pretoria,
screamed at me in Patois, Look yah gyal
or me buss up yuh face, much to the shock
of South Africans who’d never seen
a Black man threaten a white woman.
I lit straight to Rockaway, tackled
the five-foot hill of laundry, taught
my grandfather to press knobs—
cold, delicate, spin. Threw away expired
spices, simmered sauces with the good ones.
Exhausted from his domestic day,
he napped on the couch. I plotzed
on the Lay-Z-Boy, still smelled her
panoply of gastric diseases’ acids.
Body settled, cushions whooshed,
soft. My grandfather’s snores:
sleep-gasp soundtrack of Esther’s
final months. I dozed & dreamed
tall poppies in the garden of my belly.
My grandmother came
through the window to pluck them.
Grandma, I’m sorry.
And I left Chris. In South Africa.
I know, mameleh. Her hand in my hair.
Beshert ist beshert, what more do you want?
Ivy Raff is the author of What Remains / Qué queda (bilingual English/Spanish edition, Editorial DALYA forthcoming 2025), winner of the Alberola International Poetry Prize, and Rooted and Reduced to Dust (Finishing Line Press, 2024), hailed by Bruce Smith as “lacerating, fearless.” Individual poems appear in Ninth Letter, ONE ART, The American Journal of Poetry, Electric Literature’s The Commuter, Nimrod International Journal, and West Trade Review, among numerous others, as well as in the anthologies Spectrum: Poetry Celebrating Identity, Kinship: Poems on Belonging (Renard Press, 2022 & 2023), London Independent Story Prize Anthology (LISP, 2023), and Aesthetica Creative Writing Prize Annual (Aesthetica, 2023). Her Best of the Net-nominated work has garnered scholarship support from the Colgate Writers’ Conference, Hudson Valley Writers Center, and Under the Volcano. Ivy serves artist communities as MacDowell’s Senior Systems Project Manager and as a member of Seventh Wave Magazine’s editorial team, and sits on the board of Houston’s Colectiva Feminista Colibri.
