The Temple, Not the Cannon

-for all the women writers who have come before me, I have followed asking why.

The temple, not the cannon

I picked up your walking stick along the shore while the children fished your body from the riverbank. Your eyes were eaten out by fish and you were bloated, blue, full of poems and water. They ran for help while I took the stones out of your pockets, I would pass them through each generation and offer them to the sills of women writers in silent rooms who still don't realize how angry you were there alone.

I knew especially the textbooks were lying. You couldn't have been crazy. You were just contained. You needed the relentless longing to dissolve into trembling that would bring release. Your desire to write wasn't the desire to make sense of the world, but to hide yourself in so many others where you could examine the entire life of a woman in a few errands that became more frequent than knowing even the shape of her own face.

*

I picked up your book with a pink daffodil. I had never read a poem about masturbation written by a woman. It would have been different if I could have gotten to you too. Are we seeing a trend here? All the mentally bisexual poets and essayist feminists ended up in the river or oven with stacks of poetry saying it best that weren't meant to be published until death because the world they lived in couldn't make sense of their evolution after erasing our history for so long.

*

We lost you to wet towels and closed doors. I would have pulled you from the oven kissing the carbon monoxide out of you until you could breathe again. I would have packed the car and dropped the children off anywhere. You wouldn't look back. I would whisper to you about the lives of women and how this was all a set up. There you were praying on the steps of the temple with the cannon pointed at your back and a match in his hands.

*

It was you who paved the way to the temple. The fuse was soaked in kerosene and across from us he held a match like an insect between two fingers telling us not to turn. \"Can you imagine a cannonball against your spine?\" I asked.

\"Every poem unpublished by a woman has been a cannonball.\"

We cannot fear the world exploding when we are together. Walk with me and Lorde through Moscow again, and still, this longing has never gone away. I have it now in my hands smoldering into ash with countless numbered poems.