Skip to main content

Poem

This Week They Killed Your Best Friend in a Church While He Prayed, Although Many Could Save Your Life He Was The Only One that Would

Now is the time
when they are deciding
who will decide
who owns your body.
If you are not a man or a child or a virgin
you are a cruise ship, or your body
is a cruise ship and you
are the captain and if
the ship goes down
so will you.

They decide
if tiny people can kill you.
You might have thought, oh yay, finally,
my tiny person is coming
only to discover they will
brutalize you.
The undertaker will have to stuff you
so you won't look caved in for your casket

though you don't have to die, you could maybe
keep your body a little longer--

your body, whose job
you thought it was
to keep you alive
and take you to work
this body which is all
you know has been lying to you.
It is not yours. It never was.
It is somebody else's, or could be
just like that. And whether that person
is alive, or will be for long your body,
your long lost first love or your hated enemy,
your spare tire, your jiggly thighs,
your pert nipples, they are
a life-support machine. Your blood,
your liver, your heart, your lungs--
they are a boat on a river.
To keep it all afloat they
will make cuts in you, they
will tear you open
like a cheap envelope.
Maybe they will put you back together,
but the final piece
death will keep for herself,
that bitch, she has owned you
all along
and your body, which would so like
to be beautiful and to create beauty,
will be an empty, sad thing,

and you will have nothing
but your luscious, meaty anger--











Dr. Tiller Murdered the Week Pro-Choice Supreme Court Judge nominated.
http://www.kentucky.com/181/story/814086.html

Comments

Popular posts from this blog

"Self-Portrait as Medusa in Shock" Jayme Ringleb

"Self-Portrait as Medusa in Shock, " Jayme Ringleb, Puerto Del Sol Online, is such a lovely and challenging ekphrasis. I won't quote any of it, because there is this seductive kind of movement in the poem, like very classy striptease, a dance of veils, or the pulsing of a jellyfish, that when relaxed, its nearly transparent arms floating away from the body, allows you to see more clearly through what when held tightly concealed those mysterious internal structures. The layers of ekphrasis in this poem are constructed like a nesting doll, each stanza with a lovely similarity, a theme, but each leading more intimately to the interior. The poem begins in the natural world of the jellyfish, which is written over by classical myth that shares the creature's name, which in turn is compared to Biblical stories of resurrection, before the poem finally turns toward memoir. There the poem compares this idea of the classical Medusa, being confronted by her own fatal image t...

Ghosts

After Cara Mujer some silences, like soured linens, the too long gone on uncleanness in dreams, smells become characters that speak and move one of you, in a house of so many empty rooms you offer but my child will not sleep a billowing curtain is some historical, hysterical woman in a red floral print she will not quit her haunting until a tall opera singer blasts the hallway with her clear supersonic voice one of you, you come to my house while it is being built, I have to wrestle the door moulding from your hands and ask you to leave one of you, I find you dressed as a teacher in the back pews of religious high school assembly with my old bible/computer science instructor, and I mutter through the sermon and the children ask me to leave these vapors and their faces take so long to wash out

Poem on Poem Ekphrasis: Brian McHale's Feminist Reading of Berryman's Homage to Mistress Bradstreet

In Brian McHale's The Obligation toward the Difficult Whole: Postmodernist Long Poems , he starts his chapter on Susan Howe's The Europe of Trusts with a short introduction to the idea of silence of women and the canon, describing "Berryman's 'Homage'...as a kind of parable" of "the received version of literary historiography" in which women are silent or overwritten (205). McHale argues that Berryman's "poetic 'homage' to the precursor-poet consists in silencing her." (205) Anne Bradstreet , in "Upon a Fit of Sickness" writes, 'Bestow much cost there's nothing lost,/ to make salvation sure,/ O great's the gain, though got with pain, / comes by profession pure." In "Homage to Mistress Bradstreet" , Berryman says as Bradstreet's persona "Hard and divided heaven! creases me. Shame /is failing. My breath is scented, and I throw / hostile glances towards God. " You mig...