My Ariel. Sina Queyras
you were certain who the enemy was. This is why they stone haunted women. They have to kill them hard to get all the ghosts.
Mummy
after Louise Glück’s ‘Vita Nova’
You created me, you should remember me; you leaned your face into the canto of my birth, broke air with me, breathed your best, your unrest, into me, even as you bled, and my father caught me as an eagle takes a trout.
It was a rave, Mother, a real wave and blue, a sprig of fur, the three of us in our first pas de trois. You chewed the cord as he yanked. Before that I was locked in the dashboard with Patsy Cline while you two hurled and ducked and fucked.
You bore me; you should recall the blood you gave me, the bruises, how you breathed your discontent, your troubling, joyous, mysterious, mean, unquenchable thirst for life in me: you shock of blond, rare as Marilyn, a nubbly shudder of hose
and almond nougat, an edible parchment, a scroll so naive, with such fine print, so in love with your melancholy sex, you slept neatly in Technicolor, confident as a cat. You bore me, Mummy. You with your complicated luck. You should not desert me here,
not now, you should not forsake me at the lip of the mirror where the ego piques, at fifty, or fifty-one. You bathed in ice when menopause came, do you recall? You might have lived, you might have let go of history, made of sorrow a sail,
not a shroud to suffocate your Viking bones, wide and still as glaciers, your thin arms reaching out for Valium, Ativan, Ambien. You gave into yourself my Garbo, my tremolo, my Jeanne d’Arc, my dragon breather, mother, warrior, pursuer,
giver and taker of dreams, you saved me, and then you left me, don’t you recall? Don’t you remember your long arms slipping into the womb, not wanting that first painful separation, how you clung to me even before I was breath, before I was open, my mother,
my love, my jailer, your long nails like claws raking around my ears, clamping my eyes closed. You saved me. Wasn’t it that? Wrenched me into the world as you would pull an arrow from your back and use it to pick your teeth? You saved me, you should remember
me, my two moles, my wracked brow, my fingers, the flat, the round, my nails, more my father’s, like impish insect wings curled, too soft to pull your hairs, grey, my mother, myself, you said you would live for me, you said I would live for you,
to you, in you, you said, Tuck me into your pocket and walk me like a giraffe into Manhattan, just as you tucked me in your bag when you ran to and from him. You saved me, you should know me here with my upturned yes,
without a peony to my name. I come for you on my knees, slither to you on my belly: I am so sorry I couldn’t take you. I come still, digging for you to find my head once again, to set me right. To let me go, damn you, let me go.
Fever 103
I was born with a fever. It burned through the first
Six years of my life, burned scarlet, burned all night,
Burned as my mother held me upside down
To the light, jammed two fingers down my throat,
Tossed me up, casting me like a kite. I was thin, lumps
Surfaced and like sorcerers’ stones were cut and cast out,
She was my shepherd, my sight, sang to me as I
Convulsed, spewed milk, sleepless, me at her breast,
A blanche neige, hi-hi-hoing until the morning light.
Years later I was stretched like a banquet on a table,
Hands were laid, women pressed and howled: out, out,
They bid the fever slither, my insides tightening, then,
Light, like a funnel above my head, I felt my body
Rise, unmoor, and my mother’s terror, saying finally,
Stop. And my body snapping back. And the voices
Inside my body, and out: I was their Ouija board, my
Organs turned. My body snapped back into its skin.
In another time I would have been drowned or burned –
Burn – it’s what those without an exit do best.
The addict asleep is her own incendiary device.
Won’t someone light a match? Just one.
The body knows what it needs to burn, and will.
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