Monthly Archives: January 2013

eyes like the moon

26 Saturday Jan 2013

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shooting an arrow at the sun

“I shot an arrow into the air
it fell to earth I knew not where,”
from Henry Wadsworth Longfellow’s
“The Arrow and the Song”

When she came to me, Azazyel, I didn’t
put two and two together. All angels
can be fickle souls and I was pregnant
at the time. To ascribe human morals
to them is like saying rocks choose to be
good or that the sky chooses to be blue.
Really? As lovers I knew her swampy
region, her tiny hills, her lush bamboo
grove. Then came war. Just because I can’t touch
her does not mean she’s gone. Our Sammael
looks like you: with horns, hooves, eyes like the moon.
Of the rebels, the news never says much.
just, “shots fired in the third circle of Hell.”
Hurry home soon, lover. Hurry home soon.

in illness came a void at the foot of my bed

26 Saturday Jan 2013

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wayfaring

“Today, like every other day, we wake up empty
and frightened” — translators John Moyne & Coleman Barks

Last night I was ill again, the fever
that comes and goes, the blood cough, the bone itch.
No one came to visit. Not in my bed
and not in my dreams. Empty. Blank. A night
like that terrifies me. A void, despite
everything I know about dreams, the dead,
and the veil. It was as if a light switch
had been thrown. The silence was a torture.
I have never questioned the dead, they claimed
to know what they were doing. Plus, so what?
We the living always claim to know death
inside and out. We want death to be tamed;
we want our dead lovers as living smut;
our nights as orgies filling our last breath.

witch-wife: a response

25 Friday Jan 2013

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So you have issues with independent,
hairy girls? What’s this crap about her not
being “made for any man”? what blatant
douchebag talks like that these days? If you thought
all her dark craft was picked up second hand,
lifted from a Grimm’s tale, then you don’t know
jack. I bet you can’t even find Lapland
on a map. She’s a Northern Lights girl; snow
and ice do not vex her soul; polar bear
spirits love her. As a shaman she’s seen
worlds you can not even dream of. The air
is her home. She is lusty and obscene.
I am amazed that she did not castrate
you on the spot. You make a wretched mate.

* * *

I wrote this poem in response to Edna St. Vincent Millay’s “Witch-Wife,” (1917) where she lists all the reasons why having a witch as a spouse might, as the kids say, “suck dead bunnies through a straw.” The reasons she gives are terrible (what does “her voice is a string of colored beads” even mean?). Besides describing a “man of his times,” (i.e., racist and sexist) it is hard to imagine why anyone would consent to marry an ass so out of touch and hostile to their own mate as the narrator of the poem is.

She is neither pink nor pale,
And she never will be all mine;
She learned her hands in a fairy-tale,
And her mouth on a valentine.

She has more hair than she needs;
In the sun ’tis a woe to me!
And her voice is a string of colored beads,
Or steps leading into the sea.

She loves me all that she can,
And her ways to my ways resign;
But she was not made for any man,
And she never will be all mine.

la llorona: mi la lujuria

24 Thursday Jan 2013

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Like the war witch, Medea, my love killed
her sons to prove a point. My weeping ghost,
my queer Llorona. I kissed her. That thrilled
me; to have her pause in her wail, her braid
of cold hair undone, the tip of her tongue
between my lips. I washed her feet and combed
her hair. I gave her a dress from a young
mother I knew. Soon, hand in hand, we roamed
the banks of her river. All you have heard
about Llorona is, in truth, gossip.
We slept in a pear orchard and savored
our short love. The sort that feels like worship.
Once I was told the reasons, I admit,
for her deeds, but right now I forget it.

Note:

La Llorona (The Weeping Woman) is Central and South American legend of an indigenous mother who drowns her children in a river and then was forced to spend all eternity searching for them, crying as she wanders, lost the canyons and banks of rivers.

lago d’averno

24 Thursday Jan 2013

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It was dark. Drunk, we went skinny dipping
in the dim pool near the hotel. Naples
spread out far below us. Her arms, hugging
my neck, pulled me close to her. Her nipples
and my cock awoke in that bottomless
dark. How odd that something so horrific
should wear such a dull mask. Dante warned us.
So did Virgil. But I was drunk, lovesick,
wanted to make her cum, so I ignored
what I knew of Lake Avernus; the gate
to Hell, which bore our witness. I explored
her dark body. We fucked like it was fate.
Little man, you claim to be a rebel,
tell me, have you cum on the gates of Hell?

Note:

Lake Avernus (Lago d’Averno in Italian) is the entrance to the Underworld in Greek myth. It is a real lake with dark, murky water, surrounded by dense forest. Avernus is described in Virgil’s poem The Aeneid, as well as in Dante’s Divine Comedy, as the gateway that Orpheus took to find his dead wife in the land of shades.

deathblow

24 Thursday Jan 2013

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There are some ghosts you should never love. Not

that they want your love or that you interest
them, not you; in life they loved their gunshot,
stabbings, those odd marks we find, sinister
proof of some alien design. In life

peasants would cross themselves when they saw her.

They called her La Quintrala: butcher-wife
of old Chile. Even death could not slow
her down. I slept with her once, big mistake.

She was still calling a blowjob, “deathblow,”
and it was. She said, “I’ll make your heart break,”

and she did. “I only fuck you because
you are damned, like me,” she said, and I was.

khutulun’s war witches

23 Wednesday Jan 2013

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the daughters of khutulun

the daughters of khutulun

The BBC has recently reported that Pentagon will end the ban on American women in front-line combat:

US Defence Secretary Leon Panetta has decided to lift the military’s ban on women serving in combat, a senior Pentagon official has said. The move could open hundreds of thousands of front-line positions and elite commando jobs to women.

Which would mean that as early as 2016 it will possible to follow female generals into war, just like the ancient Mongolian days when Lady Khutulun led the Great Khan’s army against China.

I say all this because even in this era there exists a bizarre myth that women and war do not mix except as passive victims, patriotic mothers or trembling daughters waiting back at the hearth fire for their men folk to return. To all these naysayers, I say, “learn your history.” There have been women warriors and generals as long as there has been war.

Learn about Candace of the Sudan, who routed Alexander The Great; Falling Leaf of the Crow nation who counted coup and was considered a chief, sitting in the council of elders; Maria Rosa, a 15 year-old Brazilian girl who led troops in the Contestado War; Japan’s Tomoe Gozen, an onna bugeisha; the Trung Sisters, two 1st century Vietnamese leaders who repelled Chinese invasions for three years; Queen Boudica who led a major uprising of the Celtic tribes against the Roman Empire; Catherine of Aragon; Joan d’Ark; the pirate queen Teuta of Albania; Queen Zenobia of Palmyra; Egypt’s Nefertiti, just to name a few.

a river woman’s heart

23 Wednesday Jan 2013

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It is not that river women are all
things to all people; just that your menfolk
feel far too free with them. Even a small,
slow brook is described in terms to evoke
a kept mistress. Let me tell you: you know
nothing about a river woman’s heart.
Her sands, her deltas, even the willow
who loves her; only a cad and blackheart
would try and describe the secrets shown him.
Naiads of bubbling, rolling rivers
might let their mortal lovers try and swim
their depths, but don’t talk about their waters.
Do not betray her trust, her love supreme;
or brag when your lover is a wild stream.

witch-mouse

22 Tuesday Jan 2013

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I called her Witch-Mouse, for the dawn-glimmer
hung on her heels and the keen-eared, sassy
bat knew her by name. “Call me your mother,”
she said, parting her robes. “Call me Ommy.”
Her dark legs straddled me, guiding myself
inside; so deep that our pubes touched. Witch-Mouse
raised her hips and thrust down. She was part-elf
and part-prophetess. In the tiled bathhouse
all that she told me then came true. Outside
her small Bedouin daughter kneaded bread
dough by the wood-fired stove. But Witch-Mouse cried
and grabbed my ass and bit me until red
mixed with our cum. “Ibni,” she moaned, “my son.
I love you even more for what we’ve done.”

][][

Note: In Egyptian Arabic “Ibni” or “Ebni” means “my son” and “Ommy” translates as “my mother.”