My Ariel. Sina Queyras
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this:
There is nothing like an income
To cheer, nothing but
Humourlessness to fear.
The Rabbit Catcher
He guides you across the floor,
Thumbing your American neck:
Right, left, steady as a joystick.
What’s in this for you, lady?
You’ve already embraced
The ledge, tossed the crinoline
Off the roof, written yourself through
Paralysis and into your own book.
Was it reproduction that
Bent you to the gilded frame?
Like a poodle you leapt into
A knot of gold, you entered
The ring without armour. You
Strike a blow, bite, don’t think
To duck. It’s all foreplay,
Your body preparing to multiply.
I want to take you by the ear:
You have a spine, use it!
You don’t need a tarot pack
To see where you are:
Your rabbit heart bleats
In a field of stones.
Don’t just lie there
And let it leak,
Don’t let him
Drink you in, sell your skin,
And buy her roses.
Cut
But it wasn’t a man
That knocked me down
With the thrill of a slice
Of my will.
She was mannish,
Chilled, flung
Her will across
Mine then laughed
At my shock, when she
Gripped my neck while
Lingering over a request
For the evening meal.
Later I sliced a tomato
Close to my wrist.
The door was open.
She had warned me
Never to shut it against
Her. Otherwise
I was free to come
And go. Maybe she was
Right? I was zero
To the bone? Meanwhile,
I had left the hose
In the pond. The goldfish
Cowered in the reeds.
Whose side were they on?
I am ill, I thought,
Slogging across
Soggy green.
If I bow any lower
I will be looking up
At moss.
Thalidomide; Or, What She Didn’t Ask
What planet have I swallowed? What
Counsel has thickened my veins?
What knuckle and screech
Have I kneaded into your young minds?
I bury my doubts like glass seeds lick
Your knees and feet. I am only trying
To sleep, I am only trying to spare you
The worst of my thoughts.
I must evolve because you, you
Take all that I have eaten as gold.
You are a vial of mercury swinging
Like hips at a cocktail bar.
I hold your heads,
Your limbs, soft absences
Whose screeches
I will never know.
I am the hanged woman.
My shame rushes to your future.
A Birthday Present
The light on the coldest night of the year is glacial.
The sea has frozen and slid across the mountains
Right into the centre of our nine hundred square feet
Where nothing grows. When Gertrude Stein was a small
Girl she kept hearing a sound she described as nails
Striking stone.
Years later she realized this was Emily Dickinson
Writing and she took up the axe.
Now I watch the twins swish in unison.
The poems on their steel rails go each
According to need. A rogue poem like a wave
In a white woollen poncho,
Its fringes a soft broom sweeping down the hall, out
Into the evening traffic, which hisses
Like a fire that might bring you ease.
Daddy
I feel all the daddies, Sylvia. They brawl inside me like drunken Colossi, elbowing my aorta, kicking my uterus. I hear you wrestling with them too, trying to keep down that one toe, big as a Frisco seal. They rise up again in bean green over blue. I always heard that line as a choke of rage, now I hear you choking back disbelief, then laughing as they turn and turn. Laugh if you will, in the end it was you who was through (or not through), you who coughed your life up into husband-daddy’s hands. Still, I envy your arriving at funny. I wish I could laugh when the hands that caught me at birth and later slit me in two like an apricot fly up at me in the middle of sex. Don’t complain, the brothers say, at least he showed interest. And that is true: if you’re going to defile one of your children, you might defile them all equally. Years later I returned to that hotel room and picked that fifteen-year-old girl up off the floor. What a fool, I thought, so weak, so trusting: my vulnerability repelled. I had no love for it. It was her or me and I wanted to live, Sylvia, so I stuck a dagger in her then, and I said, We’re through. She cried out as if I had killed her. I said, Surely you’re overstating harm. Surely you can do with a gash or two, a lost limb, a cunt that drags – how greedy you are to want to be whole. You see how inside out I was? So, Daddy, I had to kill you too. I didn’t need a knife for you. I made a guillotine of my mind and let it drop. In a blink you were gone. And then you were really gone: the black boot of your lung had rotted from the inside out, and when the surgeon pierced bone, a small Nagasaki was unleashed. But even death did not kill you. You followed me for years, a man in a clean white van, offering me sweet things if I went for a ride. You haunted me with