Sylvie Baumgartel
Summer 2025 | Poetry
The Beginning
One man wanted my hair short,
For me to wear men’s underwear, to
Be brutal in my art.
Another man wanted me
To be his daughter. He wanted obedience,
Ownership. I played with this.
I played with being created, with re-creation.
I came out of my father’s forehead.
The Buddha became enlightened
When the fear of death came
At him in arrows, but instead of seeing that
Fear as sharp and dangerous,
He understood it as love.
Fear of death isn’t that but fear of life.
My aunt and uncle are afraid of the sun.
My child is afraid of being abandoned.
In this bright light of love is utter solitude.
I woke up to my child smelling
My hair and clutching my shoulder
With his claws.
My aunt and uncle eat mercury-laden tuna every day.
In my dream my mother was the enemy;
She was the fear of death.
I open my mouth and swallow her.
God is making me right now
With breath through my breath.
Sylvie Baumgartel is the author of two books of poetry: Song of Songs (FSG, 2019) and Pink (FSG, 2021). Her poems and essays have appeared in The New Yorker, The Paris Review, The Financial Times, The Nation, The New York Review of Books, Subtropics, Raritan, Harvard Review, Ploughshares, The Virginia Quarterly Review, the PEN Poetry Series, Zyzzyva and elsewhere. Her essay, “Fat Man & Little Boy” was chosen by Vivian Gornick as one of the Best American Essays 2023. She lives in Santa Fe, New Mexico.