When did we become mortal enemies? You campaigned early and hard to be our heroine and for a while it worked. But you weren’t entertaining any questions. Who besides poets have studied the intimacies of violence and lies? I hear it’s cold in heaven and getting colder— inversely proportionate to the warming on earth. The seraphim—bless their souls—are busy burning the documents of the saved. But still no damn heat. You claimed to defy heat like that nineteenth-century Indian princess—she of the silk brocades and stately elephants—who on sultry days teleported herself to the Himalayas.
A good daughter never speaks of the savagery of mothers. II.
How many did you send? Fifty? One hundred? Thank-you cards to the parents who wish you dead? Subjugation junkie. Holy broken body. There’s no end to your tasks. Stop. It’s your last moment alive. Then poof, you’re gone. What do you say?
III.
Forget your tin scepter. Your baroque concealments. The frail men in your basement bathing hamsters and cooking you colonial meals. Everything around us degrades, sister. Time will steal what remains. Overhead the ex-gods cast their shrinking shadows. No amnesty for the unrepentant, I say. You disagree. We no longer fit in the same life. But in the next one, why not be ordinary sinners together? And I, for one, will speak Polish.
IV.
Soon you’ll be dead but I’m done grieving the younger you. Between here and there, then and now, you missed the wild light. Life received you in a thatch hut on stilts. You identified river snakes by their slither and gleam. Peed through the wooden slats into the turbid waters, marking nothing. Because nothing had been taken from you yet. Now your spine crumbles from the unceasing labor of being right. You might live longer without memories but may I remind you of the time you cut my steak into tiny pieces long after I could cut it myself? What’s the opposite of a nocturne? A daydream?
Image Credits: Angy DS
