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
.
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
.
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
.
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
.
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
wyrdwind 