The Maynard
Spring 2016

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from Electric Garden: Lady Lazurus Redux, a poem sequence

1

I retain water, but fluids unmoor me. I have to get up in the night to pee. I am starred with body aches, like a gaudy shopping mall xmas tree. I don’t want to be blighted. I want more extravagant moons. Do I require an angel to hold my hand at the end of the blood? No guides exist.

2

I place my precarious hands over my ears to shut out the unrelenting grasshopper mind full of anxiety that plagues me daily when I wake up at almost dawn.

3

I’m told once again that I shouldn’t speak, so of course, I have a compulsion to lie. It’s painful to hide these starlit pangs of wilderness. Am I in a fable where the crone laughs? I ran from my father, the better to breathe, what big eyes you have, he said before he kissed me.

4

Am I made of some material that shatters easily? I have become sensitive. I cry. My mind is endlessly twitching, as if it is trying to shake out unlipped legends.

5

Never a hawk, as a child, I used to dream I could fly. Now I burn up my picture books, raze memories of my childhood to the ground until I dream no more. Mornings after nightmares, I tumble from bed, disoriented, but my body remembers. I turn the air’s lingering blue into a bird.

6

My uncaged throat apologizes for its candour. It steals thoughts that were once firmly and safely lodged in the dark unknown crevices of my brain. My mind spins tales of a sultry, long-legged vixen, but left to its own jackals, my autocratic body contradicts by giving me acne, swelling my joints and out of the blue bloodying my womb.

7

I rebel against the cynicism of age. Disregard this truant body, attempt to make my vertebrae celestial. I am tired of my murderous uterus which has reddened my birthdays for too long.

8

I’m too hot again. The fountain ices over, still with indignant angels, the pulses at their wrists beating out my wish to freeze. I would marry the cold. My bridal gown sheer and white. My wedding band a gilded syllable. I float out of this hot night puddle of sweat. A black bird pours its wings into me. I am the prodigal daughter who never returns.

9

I am not ill. I am not tall. I don’t believe that I am evil. A mad woman has inhabited me with dangerous thoughts. She stings me and I sting you in revenge. I was never any good for anything. What is the point of leaving the bed? I lash out at friends, at men who wish to bed me. I apologize when the heat is gone, but then it is too late.

10

I have a brother. I am fatherless and have always been. I have a sister. My mother didn’t allow me to be a beggar of ramshackle memory. If thieves believe the past is gold, perhaps they’ll steal it from me. I had a pyrite childhood. I kept myself small by eating nothing. I didn’t die. I deciphered codes.