Emily Lord-Kambitsch
Magdalene
Purity songs are absent from this place
where I am newly awake and infans,
pre-verbal, body ringing with the echo of a
night sitting up, before the morning call from county jail.
Your eyelids flutter in sleep, now innocens,
non-harming, before you wake to realize who you are,
or what they say you are.
Are these the right words?
What right have I to call you back to life,
from a sleep that graces you with lawless anonymity.
Purity songs are absent from this place,
the morning after a long night in a deep wood.
But they are longed for,
when life sounds like scripture:
He went to work.
He sat with a dozen friends.
He traveled alone.
He was found on the road at night.
He was bound and imprisoned.
He was freed at first light.
I am the first witness.
Emily Lord-Kambitsch is a poet-storyteller, educator, and scholar of ancient Mediterranean myth and literature based in Santa Barbara, California. Her debut chapbook, Western Yoga: A Field Report on Desertion and Deliverance, a soulful and satirical treatment of Anglo-American yoga teacher trainings, was published in 2023 by Bottlecap Press. Her writing has also appeared in the Dawntreader, Burn Before Reading, and Women Re-Creating Classics. In 2024 she won first prize for an original poem inspired by Greco-Roman antiquity in an international competition hosted by the Classical Association. Her work traces intersections between story, selfhood, language, and longing.
