Siaara Freeman

cantfindit

Siaara Freeman is 27 years of dramatic entrances and exits & from Cleveland Ohio. She is a 2016 pushcart prize nominee, 2016 best new poet nominee, 2017 bettering american poetry nominee & a 2017 button chapbook contest finalist. She is the founder of online magazine wusgood.black and an editor for Tinderbox Literary journal. She is the current coach for the Detroit Brave New Voices team. In her spare time she is growing her afro so tall, God mistakes it for a microphone & speaks into her. You can find some of her work in CrabFat Magazine, Rat's Ass Review, and Black Napkin Press. Source

Urban Girl Writes Another Poem About Her Dead Father

My father is dead.

I notice it most 

During things that haven’t happened 

yet.

 

My Father is dead 

at my wedding. 

He is a slow dance of bullets

an autopsy trying 

to make polite conversation with the guests.

My flower girl is me at every age 

he did not see me turn.

I am throwing things I haven’t seen in years

(My virginity, pig-tails, my diploma, joy and names of old lovers).

 

My father is dead 

at the birth of my first child 

The doctor asks where is the father

I say murdered out of habit.

The doctor does not specify so neither do I 

Instead we both stare 

at my child who is named after the chill in the room. 

 

My father is dead 

at my death bed. We play

Blackjack until the light comes.

 

When it does, he lifts me onto his shoulders

I get the piggy back ride promised to a child

who time had been waiting on.

Published:

2017

Length:

Regular

Literary Movements:

Contemporary

Anthology Years:

2019

2022

2023

Themes:

Death & Loss

Family

Literary Devices:

Anaphora

a figure of speech in which words repeat at the beginning of successive clauses, phrases, or sentences

Dialogue

conversation between two or more people as a feature of a book, play, or movie

Metaphor

a comparison between two unrelated things through a shared characteristic