Closing Time

I loved you for your beauty
But that doesn’t make a fool of me:
You were in it for your beauty too
And I loved you for your body
There’s a voice that sounds like God to me

And I lift my glass to the awful truth
Which you can’t reveal to the ears of youth
Except to say it isn’t worth a dime
It’s Closing Time

Leonard Cohen

Offering

Relax, you said. Breathe.
I relaxed. Counted the clock with hymn:
no weapons
formed against me
shall prosper

You flowered the room with my lungs, flung
me into the couch, to the walls, against
the fireplace. “I own you.”
You made me hear it — own —
with the knuckles’ belted cry.
It roiled from your lips
as panic spilled moths from — forget it.

This was your love: if not the body,
then the blood. If not the blood, pray
alone in the cold basement

—	let me start over. When finished
I absorbed the remains. Held between
organs.        You left not telling
tomorrow or how to mend the brown skin once torn.

Luther Hughes

complete chaos…

I am in the middle of it: chaos and poetry; poetry and love and again, complete chaos. Pain, disorder, occasional clarity; and at the bottom of it all: only love. Sheer enchantment, fear, humiliation. It all comes with love.

Anna Akhmatova – The Akhmatova Journals, Vol. 1

Fairy tales

Fairy tales offer an especially potent mix of tools to refute, repair and rebuild, not just a particular story but how we conceive of story itself. They can be what Anna Reading, in a related context, calls a “restitutional assemblage” for redefining the concept of narrative, anchoring collective memory and effecting inter-generational justice. On the one hand, the poet can assume among the audience a general knowledge of the basic plot-line, themes and characters. On the other hand, that knowledge can swiftly be turned on its head or against itself; the plots are skeletal (their bones easily rearranged), the themes unclothed desiderata, the characters flat screens onto which one can project in many shapes and colours, from front or back.

Above all, the time and place of the fairy tale are indeterminate: east of the sun and west of the moon, under the hill, at the back of the North Wind, in a forest clearing where Baba Yaga’s chicken-legged hut revolves. Fairy tales impose a linear narrative structure upon the timelessness of Faerie. The more literary the tales became the more Aristotelian the narrative, and the more divergent from the lived experience of many singers of tales and their audiences, those upon whom power was exercised, for whom the events of history as recorded in the chancelleries and courts were imposed. “Once upon a time” begs the question of what preceded the beginning and what follows the “happily ever after.” As the scholar Kathryn Allen Rabuzzi (also my mother) put it:

‘As a child, I loved fairy tales. But I was never satisfied with their endings. What, I wondered, did the characters do when “they all lived happily ever after?” I always wanted details to fill in the gaps created in my mind by those familiar, but obscuring, words. Even then, I dimly sensed that most adult women spent their lives in the non-delineated Happily Ever After, rather than the exciting time-space of story.’

Daniel Rabuzzi – On the Fairy Tales School of English-Language Poetry

Eve

I am Eve. The first woman, virginal. Full of strange ways, like a swan in a bathtub. I enter the forest. The reeds bow, the trees come closer to look at me. The beasts listen to me. I speak their language. Not men's.

I'm a crow. They don't like me. I stand proud in my black dress of loneliness. I see everything, I remember everything. The faces, the women's hands, the men's voices. No one sees me.

I'm Penelope. I'm waiting for a man. Only one. I am a prisoner of love, tireless, I am a never-ending cycle, a snake biting its own tail, a woman chained to the arms of the one she loves.

I'm a whore in a brothel. I'm sex and hands. I chant: "Vice for virtue!" I'm dancing like a fire. I look in their eyes for what was never in the Blind Eye.

I am a child. I cry a lot. I'm playing at obeying you. I'm temperamental. I don't know what I want. Between my sheets, I invent worlds filled with chimeras and talking animals.

I'm Diane. I'm a warrior. I'm not afraid.

I'm not a woman, I'm a pond of tears. A shapeless thing hidden in a closet. The wind picks up. A mimosa. A shadow.

I am Redon's Closed Eyes. Shrouded in mystery. Blurred.

I'm mean. Selfish. Violent.

I'm tender. Gentle. Caressing.

One stone.

A will-o'-the-wisp.

And again. And again. And again.

Anon

the taste of love

i stuff my mouth full of cherries. say, this is the taste of love, and i will choke on it.

Angelea Lowes -  2 Truths and a Lie

Tears

The first woman who ever wept
was appalled at what stung
her eyes and ran down her cheeks.
Saltwater. Seawater.
How was it possible?
Hadn’t she and the man
spent many days moving
upland to where the grass
flourished, where the stream
quenched their thirst with sweet water?
How could she have carried these sea drops
as if they were precious seeds;
where could she have stowed them?

 Lisel Mueller

ghost of the girl I once was

this book smells like me
woodsmoke
salt
honey and strawberries
sunscreen, libraries
failures and sweat
green nights in the mountains
cold dawns by the sea

this book reeks
of my fear
of depression's black dogs howling
and the ancient shames riding
my back, their claws
buried deep

this book is yesterday's mud
dried on the dance floor
the step patterns
cautiously submitted
for your curious investigation
of what I feel like
on the inside	

And then green August, melting-hot
days running out the bottom of the hour-
glass, school time marching
relentlessly toward the children of
summer so intent on capturing
every free minute, like flowers
to be pressed between the pages
of a book. We walked down
the hill to the creek, far away from the heat,
the trees our shade companions, the babble
of water overrunning my need to speak
we tossed pebbles into the water
everything was calm that's what I
remember the calm cuz I was safe
and happy tossing pebbles in the water
next to this tobacco-smelling boy
friend,
so when he turned to kiss
me
my mouth was wet with delight, I was new
to this kind of kiss and happy to play
by the creek with this boy whose hands then
wandered fast, too fast, too far
like a flash flood overwhelming the startled
backs of a creek that never once thought
of defence, of damming or the need for a bridge
to escape
his hands, arms shoulders back
muscle sinew bone
an avalanche of force
the course predetermined one hand on my mouth
his body covering mine
I took my eyes off the rage
in his face and looked up to the green peace
of leaves fluttering above, trees witnessing
pain shame I crawled into the farthest corner
of my mind biding my time hiding surviving
by outsiding

and when he was done
using my body
he stood and zipped his jeans
lit a cigarette
and walked away.

I didn't speak up
when that boy raped me, instead I scalded
myself in the shower and turned
me into the ghost of the girl
I once was, my biggest fear
being that my father,
no stranger to gaming
with the devil,
would kill that boy

and it would be my fault.

But that boy who raped me
on the rocks by the creek
got drunk and lay down
on a dark night to play
chicken with the devil
and he lost

Laurie Halse Anderson - Shout

Can you Imagine??

For example, what the trees do
not only in lightning storms
or the watery dark of a summer’s night
or under the white nets of winter
but now, and now, and now - whenever
we’re not looking. Surely you can’t imagine
they don’t dance, from the root up, wishing
to travel a little, not cramped so much as wanting
a better view, or more sun, or just as avidly
more shade - surely you can’t imagine they just
stand there loving every
minute of it, the birds or the emptiness, the dark rings
of the years slowly and without a sound
thickening, and nothing different unless the wind,
and then only in its own mood, comes
to visit, surely you can’t imagine
patience, and happiness, like that

Mary Oliver

Sisters…

Sisters of the torn shirts.
Sisters of the chase around the desk, casting couch, hotel room, file cabinet.
Sisters dragging shattered dreams, bruised hopes, ambitions abandoned in the dirt.
Sisters fishing one by one in the lake of shame.
Hooks baited with fear always come back empty.
Truth dawns slow when you've been beaten and lied to, but it burns hard and bright once it wakes.
Sisters, drop everything.
Walk away from the lake, leaning on each other's shoulders when you need the support.
Feel the contractions of another truth ready to be born.
Shame turned inside out is rage.

Laurie Halse Anderson - Shout