Does your life so stun, I turn you into a ghost—
dress you up in a white cotton frock and yellow ribbons,
fasten your wrists and ankles to the rack,
pin your eyelids firmly back. I call you stronghold. The thing to resist.
To cut down. I call you my propensity for psychosis, muse,
reach through your body for the beast, feel for its teeth.
Did it speak to you when you wove
a yellow ribbon through your thick black hair? Come outside. Then again as you
hung the clothes
out to dry. Into the bushes. You saw it, a cat you never had, walking through
the corner of your right eye. You tried to hush your insides, reason,
but it only badgered until you lit the match, watched the fire blacken the wood,
then lit another, and another, and another.
I’ve only known the shadow of the beast—a voice going off in my head
eight, twelve, twenty-one times a day; do I, do I, do. And maybe I wanted to—
I prod and prod at your pinking shame, unveil and expose. The trigger
for your disease. But I am more freak than compassionate, thrill
in touching the wound. Knit titles for my unscathed forehead—
Girl of the tawdry beginnings. Girl of the troubled family history.
Like Walcott’s girl in a lemon frock hunting yellow wings,
I pin and maim. Label. To know.
To witness, I console my anxious heart,
spin into verse the bat, bat, batting
of your bloodied left eye.
Published in Cider Press Review, Volume 23, Issue 5.
Catherine-Esther Cowie is a graduate of the Pacific University low-residency MFA program. Her writing has appeared in The Common, Poetry South, SWWIM, Potomac Review, Southern Humanities Review, Little Patuxent Review, TriQuarterly, West Branch Journal with work forthcoming in Rhino. The line “pinking shame” in the poem is borrowed from Kwame Dawes’s “City of Bones: A Testament.”
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