WHAT I REMEMBER AS MY FATHER IS DYING
My sister calls it “a spanking,” but it wasn’t
a spanking. He yanked my ankles and held me
upside-down, hitting my bottom and back with
the flat of his hand like a doctor trying to force
a newborn baby to breathe, but I was nine
years old, listening to my sisters plead, “Stop,”
“Daddy, please stop,” until he dropped me
to the floor, and I ran to my room, crying.
When I tell people, they’re shocked. How could
he, they ask? What could you possibly have done
to deserve such a beating? What I don’t tell them
is that it was better being battered than being told
what a bad girl I was, so selfish, so ugly, so un-
Christian, that the brunt of his hand on my body
was a blessing because it meant my father’s sin
was greater than mine and I had been forgiven.
—from Rattle #44, Summer 2014
__________
Beth Copeland: “I wrote my first poem when I was fifteen years old, a rhyming poem using synesthetic images. Of course, I had no idea what synesthesia was, but the process of writing the poem was so exhilarating that I stayed up all night writing a second poem. The next day I showed the poems to my high school English teacher who said, ‘You’re a poet!’ I’ve been a poet ever since.”