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Rumpus Original Poetry: Annie Kantar

By

Annie Kantar

•

SACRIFICE

A feast. A hole, a heart.
Entrails. Daily rites,
making right. Doilies
on a plate. Sweet savor
on a pyre. A bore (the long
passages, at least).
A burning tire. Knowing:
there’s more. The cost.
A feast, a festive chore.
Sanctity embossed, fire
that sets free, a table
setting, a scene. Smoke
on a cloth. Libation.
Fresh, flesh. Forgiveness,
compensation, for the
sin of. Stakes.
At the stake. With
his life, paid. Prayer, back
then. Figures. To have
and be had. What’s inside.
A part for the whole.
Holiness, ritual.
Homage. The price, said
shaking our heads.
The priest, fed.

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Annie Kantar
Annie Kantar is the author of Means to Be Lucky (Poets & Traitors Press), and translator of the Book of Job, commissioned by Koren Publishers, and of Leah Goldberg’s collection of poems, With This Night (University of Texas Press), which was shortlisted for the ALTA Prize. Her work has appeared in The American Literary Review, Barrow Street, Bennington Review, Gulf Coast, Literary Imagination, On the Seawall, Painted Bride Quarterly, Poetry Daily, Poetry International, Rattle, Smartish Pace, Tikkun, and Verse Daily, and anthologized in Plume Anthology (Canisy Press), The Art of Poetry (Classical Academic Press), and elsewhere.

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