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2023 Harris S. Abrahams Poetry Prize

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River Nymphs and Pebble Goddesses

by Riley Courtney

to the moon and the yew tree by Sylvia Plath This is the darkness of the mind. It’s cold and small, blue and orbital divided by a synthetic plaster and barbed sterile wires, it’s the dozens of black mirrors illuminated by the emergency light outside my hospital bed and the fluid’s screen with an arbitrary countdown to my departure. I am not as substantial as I was when I got the diagnosis. I fill up the whole bed now and they expect the fat of my thoughts to push the murmuring call button once the man outside my window finally decides to sleep. I’m his alarm. The nurses unload their grief to me as if I were God. I am God, in the worst stages of holiness. I’m worshiped in a land of children. My reaction to the needles is as stifled as I can make it, I know I’m not an infant anymore. Godliness is transient; you’re born monotheistic. One eye, one hand, one chord wrapped down your chest and into the depths of your stomach, dangling from the moon herself. You become a babbling Goddess, babel and speak on top of the tower. Your voice will be heard but spoken down to. Your cries will no longer be answered. The man asleep outside my doorway listened less when I could tell him what I wanted. What I want is my mortality back. I want to fear the day I die, to hate the idea of my stone rounded head resting severed, six feet above my body. I want to cry when I become the bruise on the apple as I force a child of my own to eat it in some ancient and radical preservation method. The door down the hall is the moon. It has no face and no right but to be still and be heard. Babies become the moon when they’re 13, only the moon shares the sky with my father. The dark side of her face is covered in blood, drenched in red and streaked all over like prom on her period. I don’t have a mother, I have a retrograde waxing crescent. I’m a river nymph in a children’s hospital bed during the age of pollution. I’m a pebble goddess with an IV working toward my personal period of enlightenment. When I walk down

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