As a Father of Daughters

As a fathom of waters 
 
As a keeper of otters 
 
As a fan of the Dodgers 
 
As a foremost scholar 
 
As a leaver of mothers 
 
As a giver of quarters 
 
As a failure of rathers 
 
As a faithful supporter 
 
As we gather together 
 
As a fear of disorder 
 
As a phantom of operas 
 
As defender of borders 
 
As a frayer of wires 
 
As a friend of the doctor’s 
 
As an author of gospels 
 
As a field after slaughter

Copyright © 2022 by Hannah Aizenman. Originally published in Poem-a-Day on March 1, 2022, by the Academy of American Poets.

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“Poets are supposed to avoid clichés—bits of language so hackneyed as to seem drained of meaning—but I’m fascinated by what hyper-familiar turns of phrase can reveal and conceal. This poem takes as its title a common expression typically deployed for the purpose of asserting the (male) speaker’s positional identity as a claim to power and narrative control: a ‘humanizing’ rhetorical gesture that functions to delegitimize and dehumanize women. Playing with this idiom, which is also a fragment—making it a formal constraint, sounding it out, in various senses—I hoped to destabilize the imagination that engenders its usage, and destabilize that imagination’s limits.”
—Hannah Aizenman