Still Life with Boy Scraping Blood

Poetry by Daniel Lurie | From Issue 31, Summer 2026

Still Life with Boy Scraping Blood


I didn’t want him to touch me, so I left 
my body for the clock on the wall, always 
a few minutes behind. I became a fly with glass 
eyes enamored by the Orb-weaver spinning 
an elegant ending. I was the empty
birdcage in the corner of the room, 
where the parrot used to swear when anyone
was on the telephone. Sometimes, I still practice
when I’m with a lover, when a friend dies, 
when my mother sobs through the receiver
that my brother’s probably in a ditch
somewhere with a needle lodged in his arm. 
Before God struck with the slaying
of the firstborn, he instructed the Jews to bathe 
their doorframes with sheep’s blood. 
Death then crawled through every unmarked 
house. It’s said the wailing was heard 
across the land; even washing its dark 
hands in the blackened sea.

Daniel Lurie (He/Him)

Daniel Lurie is an upcoming Wallace Stegner Fellow, and his work has appeared or is forthcoming in Pleiades, Gulf Coast, The Iowa Review, Poetry Northwest, and other publications.

Poet Note

I was raised in a Jewish Orthodox family and was expected to read weekly torah scripture. Along the way, I subconsciously soaked up the many parables. There’s a reason why we still weave old parables and allegories into the present, calling upon the collective contexts of each, to add layers of complexity. In this poem, I evoke the most devastating plague the Egyptians suffered before the Jews fled to the desert, to write around my childhood abuse. I’m not sure if I’m ready to write about it, and on its own, it would be too revealing but layering it upon preexisting narrative makes it feel like a plausible start.