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  • My Mother as St. Agatha Bracing for Torture
  • Bryce Emley (bio)

—after Sebastiano del Piombo's Martyrdom of St. Agatha (oil on wood, 1520)

It isn't time yet for blood. For now,        the fluid arc of torso,

the curve of neck,        the robe spilling down hipslike milk being poured into a bowl.

        For now, the indulgent postureof one poised to be kissed        as beyond, the strugglesof the ordinary world continue        artlessly playing themselves out.

The sinners, as always, are burning.        The sky goes on casuallydressing the city in dusk.        And who among us wouldn't shudder,wouldn't marvel at such tenderness,

        even as it's torqued from flesh, praisingthe elegant tragedy of it all? Feeling how,        in the muscular theater of God,the agonies are always material,        and a little overwrought.

How it's hard not to envy, a little,        such immaculate pain,so full of certainty, all that longing.        How easily you could lose yourselfinside the awful glory of it. [End Page 146]

Bryce Emley

Bryce Emley is the author of the prose chapbooks A Brief Family History of Drowning (winner of the 2018 Sonder Press Chapbook Prize) and Smoke and Glass (Folded Word, 2018). A Narrative 30 Below 30 poet and a recipient of awards and residencies from Aspen Autumn Words, the Edward F. Albee Foundation, the Glen Workshop, the Wesleyan Summer Writers Conference, and the Pablo Neruda Prize, Bryce works as a content writer and is Co-Editor of Raleigh Review.

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