The insatiability of your fingertips
Rendered me insane and injected
My body with a language that tries
To embellish your ugliness out of
Despair and utter loneliness.
I observed you and your backdoor desires
And thought that men will not rest until
They have taken everything from us and
Some of us never stop giving everything
Even if they end up with nothing but their
Ebbing bodies and harvested spirits.
I looked at the floods within you
And learned, from you, that I would
Never be enough, one child, one girl,
One woman, never good enough.
I told myself that I would never risk love.
Perform perfection, never show my unmade face
In the sunlight.
We’re one thing, then you crave another,
And we twist and turn and scratch and scream
And stop recognising who we are on pictures and
In mirrors instead of showing you who we really are
And tell you to deal with it.
You have expected the world
Of women, seducing them on their knees, reducing their
Inner lives, steering their enamoured heads in your direction
Whilst you were already eating up the bodies of others.
There was no integrity in your bones.
You’ve taken over the behaviour of your
Forefathers without questioning it and what
It did to your mother behind the shut bathroom door,
The broken glass on the floor, the overcooked food,
The boiling blood, the forcefully spread legs and invasion,
The smells of other women and you, on the marriage mattress
The never-ending confessional box in the overcrowded sink.
You infected her with shame that was never hers to bear.
She worked for no money, without breaks until death,
And everything she put of herself in the register you
Grabbed and invested outside of her walls that she kept intact
For you and what you sowed inside of her, outside of you.
You would leave her with everything and nothing, she spoke and you
Screamed, having lived your life by sucking the oxygen out of hers.
She never pulled her own hair, the residue in the garbage,
The tears in the toilet water, the brush with the scent of blood
Against her feminine skull,
-would it be put into words in the autopsy report?-
Her name next to yours, your knuckles and her jaw
The outline of her teeth, the mouth that kissed your
Children, your dirty mouth all over town, the juices
Of innumerable women and you insult her with your
Ever-blemished lips.
I replay your disgusting litany in my memory,
When I can’t fall asleep, the pleasure of women’s
Bodies landing on my cheek through your swollen
Mouth, their foreign scent and my father’s, the insatiability
And shamelessness, the murdering sex hammering against
The walls of my mother’s heart, the exhausted greedy body
Planting itself in sacred spaces, mud always finds its way in.
“Lucrezia as Poetry” by Salvator Rosa (1615-1673)
Croque-Melpomene 