Lauren DelapenhA

Lauren Delapenha is a Jamaican poet and English teacher. She earned her master’s in creative writing from the University of Oxford, and her work has received an Oxbelly Fellowship, a Helen Zell, Jamaica Poet Laureate’s Young Writers Prize for Poetry, a Grindstone International Poetry Prize, and a Pushcart nomination. Her poems have appeared or are forthcoming in Relief Journal, The Cortland Review, The Ekphrastic Review, Ekstasis, DMQ, and various anthologies. She currently lives and teaches in Connecticut. Find more of her work here: https://www.laurendelapenha.com

the incredulity

after The Incredulity of Saint Thomas by Michelangelo Merisi da Caravaggio

I grieve

not loss, but the certainty

of loss—even in the miracle of the body

cut open so cleanly, still loss—loss

of certainty, of being the last

to find relief in folded linen

and the words of women.

My grief is urban. I know how it will go.

I will die in a city, people above me and below,

as they wring water, exhausted, from laundry

out the window. Before then, I will cross

a face on the avenue I know as the face

of a lost friend, lost for some simple thing

neither of us remembers. 

Which is worse—to mourn a friend who is dead

or alive? Before answering, consider the evidence

of my hand, gnarled from carpentry,

raised now to prod the line open

that I might know horror

and wonder in the soft between one rib

and another and my Lord, my God, my hand

is dirty. My demand—bless me and keep me

dirty, that I would be unrecognizable even

to the pigeons expecting bread

from me. Memory, lift your shirt

that I might hurt, and believe.

Read more of Lauren’s work in Solum Journal Volume VI: Doubt (forthcoming).