Things were really bugging me about this the last time I posted this. Here's an edit, more for me than for my journal. Please feel free to help me workshop though.
Our Lady's Child
The Virgin Mary steals children
from wood-cutters who can't cut
bread for his daughter's meals.
The Virgin Mary grabs girls
to fill her with sugar-cakes and paradise
in a forest branched with gold
and angel secrets.
Even Heaven has traps.
Thirteen doors,
and as is the way with God there lives
the last door, the forbidden door, knowledge
that eats away at the woodcutter's child.
And as is the way with God, the child
is left with the Virgin's keys, but is forbidden
to know the charm of the last.
Of course she opens it.
And when the Virgin Mary asks,
though all signs beat-beat the obvious,
the girl's chest lies and the girl's lips deny
that door until she's cast, a mute, from Heaven.
She is found by a king, who steals
and weds her, lost in fairy-tale passion they birth
a son, swaddled and sweet like a doughy biscuit.
And the Virgin thief, on the night of new life
appears to ask that once heavenly queen to sing
the truth of the thirteenth door.
But the queen lies. And her mouth denies.
And the Virgin steals again.
And the queen's child disappears into traces
of a memory throughout the kingdom--
memories. Of a time my mother made me jelly
sandwiches. Fed me. My mother taught me me
when I forgot myself and that time she stole
my fleece jackets so I couldn't hide what made me
more than other girls, I knew she saw something in me.
That night I tossed and shriveled on a metal gurney,
burnt to the second degree, my mother,
hovered nearby like an angel wrapped in flames--
her red dress the only light house rocking
in a morphine haze. My mother and I floated
in and out of a cornball realm, her kisses
sweeter than any sugar-cake, the butter
of her mother love grew fatty in my veins,
and the day my supply got cut it killed me.
I haven't seen her crows feet in years.
We don't talk anymore. I still digest
that I'm worth more in my mother's wallet
than I meant in her fat, black heart.
And my burning angel blazed into ashes
that never made phone calls on birthdays.
The town's people called their queen
a cannibal. She ate her children, they said,
and she did consume them. To forget
that thirteenth door she gave up
the only gift her body gave her, and the Virgin
took each bundle to Heaven, again and again
and the people cried against the queen
but did not know her hunger. Her need
to bend and fang the truth, limp in her mouth,
throbbing from the kill, struggling.
I wonder how her children felt
knowing their mother ate them,
swallowed them to feed her growling need
to twist reality. I wonder what her insides felt like. Wet.
Painless. A clogged spiral seeping bile. I bet it's cold
inside the endless tube of her belly. Cold as Mondays.
Brisk as the blue shades of Etruscan art.
Frostier than watching sandwiches,
watching jackets, watching kisses disappear
into the pulsing emptiness of forgotten time.
