The Witch series

                                             Drawing by Rima Staines
Nana
 
Her voice curdled milk, her words hatcheting

the air around us, as we sat, big contemplative
lumps around the TV. She, the antithesis of ennui,
couldn't see the cloud hanging over us.
Forget sympathy. Too many things needed doing, 
shadows and creepings everywhere.

She put hexes on our father, for making too little,

and spending too much at the gin mill,

gave our mother venomous handouts,

drove her ashen with vexation,

cleaned our filthy house,

breathing incantations, rag in hand,

poking around with the vacuum wand,

spraying us all with Windex, and condemnation.

Only the baby was innocent.

To babies she was a smoocher, a laugher,

all goodness and light. At two it was all over;

they turned rogue, like the rest of us.

No candy houses to tempt us into cooperation.

Only vinegar, spitfire, a daily poison mushroom

to toughen body and spirit, a list of standards

that flew like a flag from the rooftop,

and orders barked out by the hour,

with a minute hand’s patience.

If we didn’t jump, she was a stubby cyclone,

doing whatever it was herself, then calling us

names until we wanted to hurt her too,

to startle her into silence, until she threatened

to put her head in the oven unless we let up.

She pushed, and we pushed back, until she went

blind at the sight of us. Then we haunted her

like the ghosts we’d become, howling with
laughter as she went about her rituals, sewing
God knows what into our clothes, as she 
did the mending, stirring the steaming
cauldron, or wielding her broom.

Tuesday Poem: previously published by Feminist Studies in 1999, and in The Paterson Literary Review in 2005

 

The Circus Comes To Paterson

Once they set up Clyde Beatty’s Big Top

at the foot of Sandy Hill, in the empty lot

where projects used to rise in long barracks rows,

housing the soldiers and their wives after the war,

and then struggling families like mine,

until they finally knocked them down,

flattened them like furrows

ploughed up for just a few seasons

to give us all a chance to sow a future.

And there it was: our future,

in a house, with an alleyway and a garden,

on Summer Street, ripeness setting in, I guess,

because when the circus came

our parents were giddy too,

as we joined the crowd in the bleachers,

sitting in the backs of flat beds,

and pulled in a circle

like a wagon train at chow time.

And we were just like pioneers sitting there,

doing something we’d never done,

a circus right in our living room,

that’s what it felt like

until the elephants came out

and no more than five minutes into the act

one of them broke ranks,

dragging the trainer with her,

the poor guy dangling like an earring

from the hook he held to the side of her head.

That elephant’s berserk!, someone screamed,

and we screamed too when she charged at the trucks,

as people fled up the seats and dropped off the back.

We were paralyzed, which turned out to be all right

because she wasn’t interested in us at all,

she was more intent on the freedom she saw

through an opening in the canvas

and was gone before we had that figured out.

The rest is hearsay.

Stories about her lurking behind the drugstore,

so that Doc nearly had a heart attack,

when he went to see why his dog 
was barking so loud, of how 
she wedged herself between 
the shoemaker’s house and garage,

bending the aluminum siding, 
as she eased back out, how she reared up 
and stamped a footprint in the sidewalk,

before turning tail and running past our house,

so Ralph next door thought he was 
going crazy, when he looked up 
from the paper, and she flew by 
like a bat out of hell.

They caught her way up high on the hill,

locked her in the back of a tractor trailer,

but the circus that day was done for,

there was no going back.

They worked her too hard, 

my mother said to my Dad.

This is what happens .

Meanwhile I stroked the garage’s new curved edges

where her anger had made its mark,

watching the girls take turns

stamping the sidewalk as hard as they could

inside the ring of her footprint.   

Tuesday Poem: Previously published in Claiming The Spirit Within: A Sourcebook of Women's Poetry, ed. Marilyn Sewell, Beacon Press 1994

 
Painting by Jules Bastien-Lepage 1879

Jeanne d' Arc

The best thing

was when the voices told

her to dress like a boy,

and stepping out of

the homespun skirts, her long

hair in heaps on the floor,

she put on the armor and knew

it would protect her

from rough hands,

from then on becoming her

skin : silvery scales

hardened over her tenderest

places, and she would never have to

be tender again,

not even when the fire,

trying to consume her, curled

every cell black, sent them flying

up through the air, so many

butterflies she watched

circle away and come back

to enclose her again.

So be it, she said,

for eternity encrusted in angels

darkly whispering: Yes.

Tuesday Poem: Previously published in lingerings (online) in 1999

Hog Barn at the State Fair         

  

The next pig out of the chute

is mottled black over pink,

delicately etched, so it looks

like she’s wearing lace.

And she’s running as fast as she can

around the ring, trying to get away

from the man who wants to show her,

so he hits her harder and harder,

with the stick he's supposed to be using

to guide her toward the judges

who want to take a really good look

at the fruits of his husbandry.

Watch her shoot like a bullet on pointy legs,

wounding the audience, and the man too,

now red-faced, huffing after her, his stick

landing hard on her back. The crack of it

like thunder, making us cringe.

I want to squeal when he hits her.

But then someone nearby, whose favorite

food, like my father’s, is big thick pork chops,

might blow his stack. After all she has

too much mind of her own, that pig,
she lacks discipline -- she didn't turn 
when he tapped her gently, did she? 
No, she went the opposite way,

perverse little twit. She asked for it

by slobbering on his pants leg.

Sweet Jesus, when she’s back in the pen,

the applause is a cloudburst that tries to

wash everything clean. Give that man

a ribbon! Make it black and blue!

Quick as the wind, get the next pair

out and running around the ring!