The Maynard
Fall 2019

Cherry Orchard
Meditations on Woolf, Chekhov, and Environmental Racism

My sisters are clawing under the cherry blossoms

My sisters know there is something in the water that the tide cannot erase, nor can the hums of summer breeze

Employ the concept of plunder

Extraction, contamination

Old wine in a new bottle that scourges its acidic leaking in spiralling fault

The feminine ideal of the black liberation movement, adieu!

Patriarchy’s

Egos craving to be enrobed in idolatrous charisma:

The pedestal is his bloodied throne

White Russian fox murmurs love’s delights

The androgyn slips between the knife’s blade between joy and woe

Spain, Portugal, Holland, France, Britain, and now the land of Princess Sasha and Lyuba Ranevsky

Memory’s seamstress, Virginia, does know what will happen to the river

It foams with blood

Nature delights no more in muddle and mystery

The blossoms no longer fall on the heads of the overlooked

The serf erupts with gleeful retribution

Tree after tree tumbles by axe

Regard and idly pity the poor woman with the chopper of cold steel as you reside in fiery swoons

Virginia, why display the head of a Moor?

Cut Code Noir in two

You breathe “I am alone,” yet you are fatally a flâneur

Drink in the intoxicated serfs; lower your quill

Orlando,

Spring is pooling with the rage of our sisters

We chop down strange fruits