A.E. Wynter
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A. E. Wynter is a Black writer from New York. She currently lives in the Twin Cities area where she has received grants from the Minnesota State Arts Board, was a fiction fellow in the 2021-2022 Loft Mentor Series, and most recently, participated in a regional Cave Canem workshop. Her in-progress novel Far Cry From A Woman was a finalist in the 2021 Miami Fellowship for Emerging Writers and her fiction has appeared in Tulip Tree Review. Wynter won first place in the 53rd New Millennium Award for Poetry and her poems have appeared or are forthcoming in West Trade Review and Water~Stone Review.
Poem with an Absent Father
I once craved for the soft milk kiss of my mother.
a child, I must have craved for you too, sought comfort
in the long torso of your slender-bone body.
older, I try to replace your hardness with blurred
vision, soften you through the silk squint of my eyes.
[ ] here I must try to look you head on, here I must
watch as you stand at the door. tell me this time you’re
leaving— ideas of home gone with the first belt cracked
over bare skin, gone with the wrongness of your [ ] touch.
no, we have never been nuclear, we are more
the silent choke or more the mold spored in your lungs.
each night the [ ]–daughter dying many deaths, each night
the child learning how your [ ] face is an illusion—
sight lines prismed, distorted, you, already gone.
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