Altar Call
by Tiphanie Yanique
“If you bring forth what is within you,
what is within you will save you.”
— from The Gnostic Gospel of St. Thomas
The first time the man left her he walked down the aisle,
his face blank with hopelessness or with hope.
The preacher had begged for those who wanted Jesus,
and so he was headed towards the altar.
The wife whispered, “Wait, my love,”
but that was not enough up against God calling him come.
That night the man asked her to pray with him.
He recited, as he always did, the Our Father.
She performed the Hail Mary for him
and he lay in her lap like a child.
She claimed him as her bright little boy.
For after the altar, he could not be her man.
For years he believed he would grant her
a mansion, even though he never
managed half their tiny rent.
She learned that truth
was not what he could stand
and so he was never told that the landlord
was her lover. He was never told
that their son, slow, took after him.
The story of their life together
is the same as anyone’s.
From Wife. Reproduced with kind permission of Peepal Tree.
Forward Prizes for Poetry
Winner of Best First Collection 2016
Wife
Tiphanie Yanique
About Tiphanie Yanique
Tiphanie Yanique (b. 1978, Virgin Islands) has long considered herself a writer, indeed, when asked in school for three words to describe herself, she ‘would say, “Caribbean, girl, writer.” Maybe not always in that order.’ Further, she notes how children ‘speak in metaphor, that they hunt down language as poets do, that they use their vocabulary limitations the way poets might use the limitations of poetic form – to find a way to say something anew.’
Wife, her debut collection, was begun in 2000, but became increasingly focused: the more recently written poems ‘are more clearly about the complexities of heterosexual marriage.’ It has already won the 2016 Bocas Poetry Prize.
Yanique, who was taught by Claudia Rankine, winner of the 2015 Forward Prize, says of teachers that they ‘can destroy you or they can build you. Sometimes they do one in service of the other.’
Asked what is next for her as a poet, Yanique replies: ‘I have a lingering feeling that there is more I might be able to discover about the ways in which being a woman inside of a family and being an island inside of a nation are connected.’
