The Atheist Wore Goat Silk by Anna Journey

View this email on a browser Forward to a friend December 1, 2014   The Atheist Wore Goat Silk   Anna Journey

I’ve wanted to visit the genetically modified goat spliced with silkworm DNA spinning white threads from its pink udders like a piebald spider. I’ve wondered how much for a whole goat silk dress? Always I save the spiders that shimmy near my eyes but never the bristled silverfish which drop to the boatwood dinner table from the skylight. Come Indian Summer the fuchsia bougainvillea unpurses its dry lips, licks the sweat from my neck. My mother tells her childhood best friend—who’s dying from liver cancer in Jackson, who consults a Pentecostal woman who speaks in tongues—that her two daughters are atheists. Meaning my little sister and me. Somewhere there’s a goat that squirts a rare silk so bizarre maybe no one would actually wear it. That webbed dress sticking to my chest, the grandfather clock, all over the bedroom walls like a past that drags everything with it. The thread leading back to an animal I badly need to believe in. Its impossible milk steams in the twilight. There’s a dress that rises from its udders with a misted sleeve I can almost see.            Copyright © 2014 by Anna Journey. Used with permission of the author. About This Poem   “‘The Atheist Wore Goat Silk’ is a phantasmagoric beast fable that draws from the realms of apocryphal science and family anecdote. Despite its title and atheistic speaker, the poem, I hope, becomes a lyric inquiry about belief.” —Anna Journey   Anna Journey’s most recent collection of poems is Vulgar Remedies (Louisiana State University Press, 2013). She is an assistant professor of English at the University of Southern California and lives in Los Angeles. Most Recent Book by Journey   Vulgar Remedies (Louisiana State University Press, 2013) "Letter to Jerusalem" by Elana Bell "Prayer from a Mouse" by Sarah Messer "Wild Gratitude" by Edward Hirsch Poem-a-Day   Launched during National Poetry Month in 2006, Poem-a-Day features new and previously unpublished poems by contemporary poets on weekdays and classic poems on weekends. Thanks for being a part of the Academy of American Poets community. To learn about other programs, including National Poetry Month, Poem in Your Pocket Day, the annual Poets Forum, and more, visit Poets.org.   You are receiving this e-mail because you elected to subscribe to our mailing list. If you would like to unsubscribe, please click here.   © Academy of American Poets 75 Maiden Lane, Suite 901, New York, NY 10038