Mea Culpa, by Theadora Siranian

Small Portrait, by Kay Sage (USA) 1950

Mea Culpa
 
With the curtain peeled back you can see
beneath I’m wrought from timber, so
then, can claim I was once alive, lived
and grew beneath the sky. Now become
mere armature, though somewhere lurking 
in this dynamo some leftover gristle,
electrical impulse. I’ve got feelings,
I swear it. For example, my blessed,
busted little heart is today at an utter loss.
Can we prescribe victim to someone destroyed
by a force without sentience? The apple may 
want to rot and fruit at the foot of the tree 
but gravity doesn't care much either way. 
The good book says a person who suffers, says 
at the hand of either agency or action so maybe 
sentience is overrated in this world. But what 
of cause and effect, of our invisible hands 
puppeteering across the lives of others?
Every time I step through this door my body
becomes something to give and to take.
The good book says also: a person or animal 
sacrificed, or regarded as sacrifice..

Theadora Siranian

Theadora Siranian is a graduate of the MFA Program at the University of Massachusetts, Boston. Her poetry has appeared in Best New Poets, Ghost City Press, CONSEQUENCE, Rust + Moth, and Atticus Review, among others. In 2014, she was shortlisted for both the Mississippi Review Prize and Southword’s Gregory O’Donoghue International Poetry Prize. In 2019, Theadora received the Emerging Woman Poet Honor from Small Orange Journal. She currently lives and teaches at Nazarbayev University in Kazakhstan. Her chapbook, She, will be published as part of the Seven Kitchens Press Rane Arroyo Chapbook Series this summer. More of her poetry can be found at theadorasiranian.com.