Marliee Goad
p o e t r y
Rewriting the Self
Burn ten pages to watch them unfurl red leaves gone
black at the edges — follow the blue, its center holy
light enshrouding chemical transformation, break
bonds and reform yourself into the ashes you tape
back together, sentences crossed out and rewritten:
first draft the precursor to a chapter so different you
can’t quite recognize the pen that wrote it, nib sharp
and quickened to an ink swirling cursive mysteries
made real: the terrarium sprouting life from the
water trapped beneath its glass canopy, recycled
rain the answer to grief unstuck between two deaths
you cannot mourn: yours and not yours. In the second
writing, relight the fire, plunge more fuel into its core.
Undress the clothes that mask the body, naked form,
flame to flesh, heat kissing the space between. Accept
the discomfort and shatter the page. Let it all burn.
Precious porcelain
You said, it won’t hurt, but it has only ever hurt,
the way you look at me with eyes hungry and wide,
deep dark brown orbs devouring the platter of moist
tender meat heaped on precious china, the clink of
your knife against porcelain like the sound of my
heart dropping, thudding beyond the ever-present
realization that no matter what grace I might employ
you shall always seek the pure womanhood of my
form and divorce her from my humanity,
compare and price me next to past lovers as if
we are cattle, hides sweaty and flea-ridden from
the stench of your breath and that of your
predecessors — sometimes, in an attempt to love
and be loved, we forget that we are each worthy
of the reverence and respect that you save only
for your fellow men, warm welcomes drowned out
beneath the menstrual blood you find repulsive
but which carries you and your progeny ever
onwards, despite logic’s appeal that we forego
your affection for the sake of self-love and respect,
to reclaim the simple fact of our humanity,
imperfect and beautiful.
What We Women Have to Endure
The doctor squeezes my hand as she inserts her probe and mourns what she says
“we women have to endure,” and I shake and sob and think fuck that, I am tired
of what “we as women” have to endure, I am tired of the poking and prodding,
the refusal to grant us space, liberty to consume life with all the vigor and vice we
can muster, the acquiescence to men and manners that demand we accept their
privilege, their freedoms at the expense of ours, the tussle in the hay that costs
them nothing but the faint possibility of a treatable infection, our risks higher
in almost every way, the shame and stigma blotting out desire with its scarlet
letter, unfurling devotion in a crimson cloth that cloisters and confines until we
cannot even name that which we most want, until everything we touch is marked
and marginalized, castigated with the hated brand of femininity screaming its
pink and purple banshee howl, singing damned if you do, damned if you don’t.
When St. Joan Visits
At home, they whisper benedictions for my womb:
not me, just my organ, rosary beads clinking into
action for the sake of progeny unspooling from yarns
of faith and tradition, woman you were made for
nothing more than my vessel, I gasp and disavow
my former devotions, reject assertions spiraling
into commands that reduce ambition to the moment
I could die, for the sake of new life, blessed red
streams baptizing tiny heads in the ritual of our
sacrifice, my heart heaving in its misery, craving
more than this endless duty, knees ground into
granite floors for the sake of religion and
consequence: when Joan appears in my dreams,
I beg her for her armor, but she demurs, enfolds
me in white robes that swathe my hopes in
swallowed centuries of my chromosomes: what
if I’m not even a woman? She touches my lips
with her fingers, shushes curses and grins, says
nothing, only holds me in her stare, motions
with scissors to my hair — to cut long locks free
of tropes that bind me, as if a disguise could
subsume the roles that shackle me to my state:
how many prayers is gender worth? Joan shakes
her head; it’s the wrong question, still tied to an
imagination in captivity: breathe harder, feel
millennia bloom inside you, ancient rocks devoid
of identity, dust cruising space in its solidity:
still yourself. Joan disappears and I stay here,
wondering how birds learn to fly when their mothers
flee them, nests upturned in abandoned caves: how do
I go on with no map or saints to guide me, only wispy
dreams by which to see, so far off from my reality?
Marilee Goad attended the University of Chicago and has work published or forthcoming in Ghost City Review, rose quartz journal, Persephone's Daughters, OUT/CAST, and Georgetown University School of Medicine's Scope arts magazine. You can follow her on Twitter @_gracilis and find her website at marileethepoet.tumblr.com.