Tag: feminism

Divorce Rat by WIFE X

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Divorce Rat

When my husband and I thought we would stay together,
we decided to landscape the front, tear out the weeds,
pull out a row of shrubs and one big tree.
The shrubs had been planted back in the 80s when the house was built.
Upon quick glance, you might think they were fine—the tops green,
like a toupee. But all of them were half or three-quarters dead.
Brittle by their pudgy middles, desiccated and brown from their waists
down into the ground. We chain-sawed each one at the base,
not realizing the sweaty months, the hatchet hacking,
what sweat and pleading and burns on the palms
to pull out the roots. Into drilled holes, we poured soap
and salt, soaking the roots. Then burning, hand-sawing off
some of the larger roots like taking off an octopus’s legs
one by one, until my husband could use a large pole as a lever,
and you heard the tear. To tear a tree from the Earth
sounds like you’re ripping God’s thick fabric.
When we pulled out the last one, the biggest,
not a shrub but an actual pine tree, taller than either of us
and dead to the height of our heads. Amid its dead roots,
we saw a tunnel in the soil, and a big fat rat body
rolled out and lay on its back on the gravel driveway in the sun.
Once during a fight, I told my husband my affair was his fault.
Not in those words exactly, but it’s true, I blamed him.
I realize now how much this was like the times he had told me
his being suicidal was all my fault. Excuses, how much
I loved the baby compared to him. Once the weeds and tree
were gone, we could see the dry dirt, full of the kind of grubs
that indicate the soil is gone, containing little to no nutrients.
My husband later claimed my affair was to punish him.
I can see the way in which I was, indeed, indecent, an eye for an eye—
not with the affair exactly, because I thought I loved that other man—
but with the blame. The rat lay there. Then, amazingly, sprung up.
Ran into the woods. Terrifying to see a country rat, larger than
a chihuahua, spring into action. Terrifying and thrilling.
A rat is a creature that can survive a dry, dead burrow
filled with chemicals and illness. To think, its belly warmed
from the sun. To pretend to vanquish your foes: a shovel, a chainsaw.
To pretend to reanimate, your own Firebird
from the ash, your own springtime, to begin again.
I am a rat, I might tell my next lover. A rat is a creature
that can play dead for eons until it nearly forgets it is alive.
A rat is a creature who knows how to get by.

*

“All is fair in love and war,” the saying goes. WIFE X disagrees. Pat Benatar sang, “Love is a battlefield.” And with the statistics about intimate partner violence, household labor, and more–WIFE X agrees with Benatar, which is why she is using this nom de guerre as she writes from her home somewhere on the East Coast.

That’s on you by Sophie Frankpitt

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That’s on you

watch her fade away
her gaunt cheeks and
hollowed eyes, once
bouncing hair now in
tendrils, cheekbones
jut in sharp lines and
wrists that look too
fragile to touch, watch
her punish herself for
all she is not

that’s on you
all you taught us
all the pictures
the waist-touching,
leering, the men on
the street who shouted
at fifteen-year-old us,
the boys who lined us
up on the playground,
the dates women didn’t
come home from, the
streets we can’t walk
down, the live location
always on, hit by hit –

hit by hit –

scream by scream
deafened by other
women’s pleas
she fell to her knees
praying that her own pain –
the pain you so ironically
call self-made –
would distract her
from lifetimes of yours

*

Sophie Frankpitt is a poet and linguist from Somerset, England, having recently graduated from the University of Warwick with a Linguistics degree. She is a newly emerging poet, though she regularly performed spoken word in Amsterdam during the year she studied there.

Young Lady Auto Mechanics 1927 by M. Nasorri Pavone

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Young Lady Auto Mechanics 1927

        From a vintage photo of high school girls in shop class

Were we brazen or that curious?
We were certainly teased
for putting our hands at risk.

Anyone with a beef about it
blamed the school for our folly.
But what if we didn’t grow out

of our interests? We guessed why
we had to read The Scarlet Letter.
We learned what was expected.

Some killjoy compared us to Eve
with the snake rolling out
an auto-size apple.

From where you sit we look
as united as an all-girl garage band
posing for an album cover,

our blunt bobs, our Mary Janes
beneath our rolled up cover-all cuffs.
The boys called us degenerates.

So? What we’ll never know is
how you came to love us in a way
we’ll never get to share.

At left there’s me, Grace Hurd. That’s
Evelyn Harrison, Corinna DiGiulian,
and Grace Wagner under the car

at Central High in Washington D.C.
We weren’t kidding. We got in there,
got greasy, made that engine sing.

*

M. Nasorri Pavone’s poetry has appeared in River Styx, One, b o d y, Sycamore Review, New Letters, The Cortland Review, The Citron Review, Innisfree, Rhino, DMQ Review, Pirene’s Fountain, I-70 Review, 86 Logic, and others. She’s been anthologized in Beyond the Lyric Moment (Tebot Bach, 2014), and has been nominated several times for both Best of the Net and a Pushcart Prize.

Allure by Clela Reed

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Allure

“A domesticated cow [French Limousine]
has been found living among a herd
of gigantic bison in a Polish forest.”
       — Ornithologist Adam Zbyryt

Maybe what first caught her eye
were the elegant black noses, sculpted,
with the oiled sheen of crow feathers
so unlike the pale, flat ones of her herd
whose insipid brownness filled her days.

Or perhaps, it was the way they stood
silently at the edge of the field, watching,
their stoic eyes shining like berries tucked into fur.
Maybe it was their ancient forms—muscular, dark—
or the beautiful upward curve of their horns.

It could have been the way they kicked away
the wolves at the edge of the primeval forest.
Maybe it was musk. Or the curly coats
or the shaggy beards their proud heads tossed
as they turned to go. No one knows, but something

urged her to follow the mystery that stirred
and called, leave the old familiars to chew
blandness, to blink their stolid, long-lashed eyes
as they watched her walk away
and not look back.

*

Clela Reed is the author of seven collections of poetry. The most recent, Silk (Evening Street Press, 2019), won the Helen Kay Chapbook Prize and then a 2020 Georgia Author of the Year award. A Pushcart Prize nominee, she has had poems published in The Cortland Review, Southern Poetry Review, The Atlanta Review, Valparaiso Review, The Literati Review, Clapboard House, Red Door, and many others. A former English teacher and Peace Corps volunteer, when not traveling or chasing deer from her garden, she lives and writes with her husband in their woodland home near Athens, Georgia.