DEVOTION PRINT

To give up my child to be worshipped as a kumari
I must imagine her alone in a room of slaughtered
goats. The Buddhist priest peers inside her
mouth, admires thirty-two perfect attributes,
her scarless birth chart, legs of a banyan tree—a body
to be inhabited by the spirit of Taleju. The hands
that have pinched the hair on the back of my neck
offered the rouged meat of persimmon, are now
painted amaranth. If she withstands the trials,
she’ll be the next living goddess of Nepal.

But first, she must walk the grounds of buffalo heads,
their eye sockets lighted with candles. Sip from a horse’s
skull. All this she must do without fear, her calm
mistaken in the red and slow-pouring shade.

Michele Poulos’s poems and fiction have appeared in Crab Orchard Review, Copper Nickel, Waccamaw, and storySouth. Her book reviews appear in Blackbird. She was a finalist for the 2008 Charles Johnson Student Fiction Award and is a two-time nominee for inclusion in the anthology Best New American Voices. She teaches English at Virginia Commonwealth University.