the wood that my daughter is made out of | an ancestral poem | a winter’s nightgown

I’ll grab my daughter tight

I’ll grab her oh so tight

don’t breathe so loudly Daughter of mine

I’ll put you in a corset with my mouth

teeth around your edges, tongue smoothening smothering

I’ll mould your memory, spin it, spiralling down the drain,

oh Daughter I’ll mould you good

my spit on my daughter, glue, daughter, glue,

my saliva over my daughter, wax, on my daughter’s face

I see my daughter close to death

the power rises in my body and my nerves

I give life and death and eroticise

my mother taught me that women’s bodies are mine to break

mine to love the way I see fit

Mother told me that women adapt to how I proceed

I am the builder of the net and they’ll follow my pattern

I set the tone, but my wife walks a long way in the middle of the night

to take what she is due, to be taken as she deserves

eats men with her eyes, I starved her

tries it with my daughter’s husband

child within her, envelops women in public, wax, saliva, appetite

my wife wants to be eaten alive

but instead she dies and dies and dies

and I stew and stir and expose myself on my deathbed

I shoved my tongue down my daughter’s throat

I shut her out the house in a dark winter’s night just to see if she would fight to stay alive