wyrdwind

Sloe Gin

You’re lazy in my hardened arms

Love wood don’t chop itself

And my nose scents your thicket

While you’re still coming down

Lord how’s a woman get anything done

Still atwirl your dewy hedge

Well I must make a fire now

You’re fit to catch your death

Blame it on the blackthorn laden

Blame it on the winter white

Flocked with ice as down in spring

As you once came to lie with me

As once you wore naught underneath

Did I not swear our fingers laced

With little more than boot string

You offered up this aching wretch

From then until eternity

Pulse but dove-beats on my lips

I warned you soft as we proper kissed

You’d catch your death

You’d catch your death

And you swore blood by wetted prick

And you half wept as you said yes, yes

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Inferno

Less than ash the weight of “witch”

Where once the crime of woman commit

So young was I to learn my geas

Were it mine to bear or mine to give

Surely as a mother knows your nature knows your end

And ever may the mighty go to her with grace

Was it a woman flaming haired

Produced the blackened blade of Need

Black as fungus, black as pitch

Sunken sockets and squelching feet

And she bade this child Look At Me

When all your children do is take

A woman must survive

No man is owed a life

No man is owed a wife

When men rot tooth at supple teat

They know not for whom they fight

That cross infection opportunistic

They’ll breed their feast upon a famine

Squalor and religion are hope’s abortifacients

Take to woman’s silence and submission

As mold makes womb in warm and wet

Hips of burden sixty more percent overbred

What man did ever consort with consequences

Did aught but level fingers sucking soured frigid air

We women have superior immune systems

An organ with pleasure as its only purpose

A man who cannot address a goddess

Well he’s no man at all

And manners maketh civilization

Land and language are female nouns

Your land your tongue the shape of it

The bed you make you lie in it

Prayers are mouthed from a woman’s mound

For shame devoid pronunciation

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Dark and Bright

“Kill the Indian, save the man”

Much less a woman warranted

Short capped once worn to calves

Open season between our legs

Scrubbed and shocked and needle pierced

Dared we speak as our mothers did

Perchance a child could escape

But they’d be hunted, their peers punished

But escape is what my namesake did

And the government could scarcely cow the man

That is her daddy the second generation Irishman

Who walked the death march hand in hand

And kept his council with an unmarked grave

A widower not long past the end of it

He had but one child remaining to his name

His youngest likewise scandalous

Raised in her entirety by him

This all well and good above reproach

For he’d not call himself a failure when they met again

Come and get her if you think you can

My daughter says your schools are bad

Choctaw by marriage

She took his surname but he took her clan

Spoke the language of his loveland

In Mississippi marsh where first they met

For all they bayed her hand been stolen

Our men are chosen by our women

Desire undiluted, our whims distill a matriline

Grace with favor blanket any giddy stallion

Had the measure of the meaning then

Known to announce and hold position

Little removed from sea and sextant

Little lost the O’muiris patronymic to immigrant eclipsis

Stunted and decapitated

Lest its shape offend the Anglo speech

When what it means to be a man

Is choosing where to stand

And as many times I’ve said

This name we share, the name he gave, and born on his own birth day

One month ahead of schedule

I am Faith the second

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Angel in the House

A hobbled sow suckled an empire’s finest soldiers

Sons afforded choice of muddy ditch to die in

Daughters milked and bloated soon as he could manage

Many a foreign whelp might have called her mother

Nanny, maid, laundress, temptress

Convent, kitchen, brothel, field

Swindled destitute or anonymous authors

Penned to death without inheritance

Given alphabet begot despair

For every man of letters turned philosopher

How many women there cleaning up?

How many women underfoot?

Call her Brigid or call her Beatrice

Grown man grubbing after teat to suck

Crying at his own diaper stench

Bereft the good sense goddess gave a hog

For captivity is just cannibalism all gussied up

The feral pig forms sounders in the wild

Many mothered bands of sisters and cousins

Led by the most dominant mature female

Attained rank of great or grand bare minimum

Steers her many daughters clear of hunger and harrow across vast terrain

Leaves no threat unchallenged

If she charges, grandmama’s had enough

She ages in reverse

Think not weigh your stones against a Cailleach

Test your idly wintered wits against her storm

Where dire winds without forest to obstruct

Render furrows plump a bone split tundra

Tombs of steel and brick and book respectable

Having a think on culture and manhood at large

Poorly pondered ponces skipping rocks

I wish you luck

.

BYOB

Near enough a soup of stones

Earthen lumps and buttermilk

Simple smiles as weathered fair and green was good

Oh, well, they knew no better

No better had their betters been taught

Well the parable just hadn’t stuck

Not a child two steps from its mother’s skirt

Not a story heard would walk past rocks in a pot

Oh, well, they’re just backwards

Their directions, their land, the language

Verb Subject Object whatever is that

Can’t tell their talking from singing

All trickling tumbling psithurism susurration

Spilling all over woolly and curled

Entirely too rambunctious

Like holding excited children in your mouth

Careful not to crush them

When bade they walk with bowls in hand

Bowls they brought from home in rags

At last a hurt a moment worse than hunger

And denied them even that

Oh, well, they knew no better

Their mills in disrepair were simply ill-equipped

All they knew was workhouse and shovel under armed export

We were only trying to help

Soup kitchens are nourishment enough where we come from

These things must come down proper channels

Without wood and roam and forage

Leaf and grub and game and understory

A sounder can only turn upon itself

A matriarch has nowhere left to go

No words in common with her farrow

Any mouths are too many mouths

You couldn’t imagine to look at her come circle now

Once, their ancestors danced and wore bright colors

They sang

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Rest and Respectability

Stains of labor great render glaring invisibility

Red or dun compelled by uniform turn blind from decency

Every table neatly dressed astride nail bitten legs

Forever wonder scored with grief if yours a child’s seat

Humbled haunches stripped of stature as once were stripped of trees

Who woke beneath living monument now wakes atop a grave

As every battered woman knows the sea of tidy strangers on a Sunday

Tugs at borrowed cloth and vanished threads to weakly wrap herself

The whispers could be so much worse

Well Faith had a falling out with the church

Jarring is the mirror shows a woman what she deserves

Shrieking is the rage when her reflection is the earth

They pray over their supper she knows no better

Faith had a falling out with the church

How lucky to have a lawyer for a husband

Such a well appointed highly educated alcoholic

Father of two daughters and several miscarriages

How she held her daughters tight while he howled outside

Prayed until the cold and drink set in with silence

Hypothermia is a peaceful death

Her stony visage unabashed unduly admonished

The Virgin Mary a rose but thornless with her gaze downcast

Does naught but weep with richly folded elegance

Commend her dignity unto the father’s hands

That is her daddy the second generation Irishman

Unto the house he built by vows he meant upon his woman’s land

Choctaw by marriage

Thought they he’d bar the door when he’d sooner paint it black

God, pass judgment if you think you can

My daughter says your church is bad