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2.51: Creative: A Last Supper

  • Page ID
    21033
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    my tiniest apology
    Stephanie Couey is a Ph.D. candidate in English at the University of Colorado Boulder. Her work is on Multiethnic Contemporary Women’s Literatures of the United States, and her dissertation examines race, gender, and national identity within works of fiction, non-fiction, and poetry that centralize food, hunger, and the body. She previously received her MFA in Poetry, also from CU Boulder, and she teaches undergraduate courses in Literature and Creative Writing.

    my tiniest apology

    if I could have made you your last supper
    it would have been
    the reddest slaughter, a halting
    ritual of bones, a bound and roasted
    lamb on a sea-brined bed of greens
    there would have been
    a quieting side
    of creamed potatoes
    all biting hot and familiar
    like a coming-of-age novel

    but would you have even accepted
    this shrine of abundance, my last offering,
    or would it have been just another
    blister for you to swallow?

    what matters now
    is what remains – of you
    – your dad
    in your apartment, all empty
    your cabinets all empty
    bookcases and I can feel you
    getting mad at me
    for simplifying
    your relationship to grace
    my inanity for equating
    salvation with satiety
    but I have to imagine

    a final moment of moments
    where you allow yourself
    against yourself, and your insistent ache
    to share in the private yet common
    truth of, the simple fact of,
    a right-made custard and a honeyed éclair
    with slabs of pear and fig and all the earth
    you had to leave

    I hope you’ll accept just this:
    my tiniest apology,
    so sincere, fugitive, and sweet

    [for Shawn Collins, 1989–2021]


    This page titled 2.51: Creative: A Last Supper is shared under a CC BY-NC-SA 4.0 license and was authored, remixed, and/or curated by Stephanie Couey (eCampus Ontario) via source content that was edited to the style and standards of the LibreTexts platform; a detailed edit history is available upon request.