About the poem: My writing process is sporadic though my ideal is to write most mornings when still in that liminal space between dreaming and waking. I bring my lap computer to bed and let the thoughts spill into a range of stuff from an image I later develop to a passage I really like. If I show up regularly and am open, my best 

writing comes.

* This poem is part of Chella's chapbook, In Their Own Way, forthcoming from CHB.

The artist's space.

Job's Daughter

 
I do not skulk from God.
He has no eye for me
only for my father—tall and brown
hands that raise me over his head.

Hurling insults like thunderbolts, God calls
him harelip, mooncalf. Father hides
seven days under the bellies of three sheep.
With a dulled razor, God shears

their backs slowly before burning them.
He forces the camel to sit on the cold earth,
head down, and gives father a white flint knife.
Slice the thorax, He bellows.

Father turns away—not a butcher.
The camel lives two hours. My father crawls
inside the camel’s skin and closes it over him.
Flesh still warm.

Crow Hollow 19

Chella Courington

Murder Three, Summer 2016

Crow Hollow Books

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