My little sister is in love with a girl who has our mother’s name.

to d.

Don’t bother. The punch line was here before you walked into the room.

Something something Oedipus. A father grows strange

to his family & a daughter grows up to become him,

the other to become him. Before, my sister was a dead-letter

girl, no mouth, or hands where her mouth should be.

If she made no sound, it never left her. Nothing left her.

She could be an emperor if no one knew. That’s a detail—

my sister training to reign in silence for no reason of biology, unless

a person can be born with an orchid in the throat, grief, a spare organ. No.

That isn’t the right word. Never is, not even to describe what happened

between us—my father & I—  when you built a world for me

he could not enter. 

Cameron Awkward-Rich is the author of two collections of poetry, Sympathetic Little Monster (Ricochet Editions, 2016) and Dispatch (Persea Books, 2019). His writing has appeared, in various forms, in Poetry, American Poetry Review, Transgender Studies Quarterly, Signs, The Paris Review, and elsewhere, and his work has been supported by fellowships from Cave Canem; The Watering Hole; Duke University's program in Feminist, Gender, and Sexuality Studies; and the ACLS. Presently, he is an assistant professor of women, gender, sexuality studies at the University of Massachusetts Amherst.

"My little sister is in love with a girl who has our mother’s name.” was published in Dispatch (Persea Books, 2019), and appeared in Bat City Review Issue 12.