After which Sarah was no longer barren by Brendan Todt

After which Sarah was no longer barren. So when the first galleys of the first book arrive and she sees her name on the spine, she says it out loud like one of those ancient incantations and notes how different it sounds, especially from the way her mother pronounces it. And she is not ashamed to say she permits herself to imagine the way hosts of readings across the region—at least in the few adjacent states—will pronounce it, extending a hand to greet her and then to lead the audience in brief peremptory applause.

And she thinks about Sarai and Sarah, and Sarah and Hagar, and the men Sarah herself has had affairs with, how she knew the one was married but not the other. And how out of Sarah—and out of each of the men, therefore—came poems which begat more poems, whole nations of poems, many of which are dead already, all of the poems always on their steady way toward death, generation after generation of dead poems coming out of her body because of what she has taken into it.

And she thinks about her mother, who has always wanted to be called upon by god, and therefore changed by him: from Sarai into Sarah, from Jacob into Israel. Instead, she had two daughters, and if god ever spoke to her she must not have been listening. Perhaps she never wrestled with the angel because she was so sure the angel was supposed to look like one. But Sarah knew her mother wrestled with many things: living and not, divine and not, sleeping and waking: the daughter she loved and the other daughter—whom she also loved.