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okelo@pon.net

By the Time You'd Gone To Bedlam
(After Anne Sexton)

Suppose I'd never picked up that book,
seen fairy tales transformed
into life the way I knew it,
still believing happy endings lasted forever,
I'd never have known how they began.

I'd never have known the
hard click of a typewriter key,
that fierce first kiss on the blank page,
how to breathe when the words got tangled up
how to leave the other things

(laundry, dishes, babies, all of it) undone.
By the time you'd gone to Bedlam
I was being born a woman
by the time you were half-way back
I knew my mirror for the witch it was.

My sheets were ruffled and ink-stained.
My mixing bowls bled with words not yet written.
I liked things better in the chaos
of having chosen the harder life.
You became my mother and my saint,

whore and muse and tender prophet of supposition--
angel killed on the roadway
holding up a sign for all her kind.
That was the road I followed,
supposing that old equation

of life and art not mixing
was the real fairy tale
and all else was for the taking
if I could give up the words
once upon a time...

Published in RUNES

Forbidden Fruits
(After Erica Jong)

Your fruits
were jucier
than anything I'd ever eaten
at twelve
calling to me
from a future sweetened by
prohibition,
I bit and I bit and I bit.

My friends and I
would cut to the page
where "penis" jumped out--
a word we'd never seen in print before.
Each time we'd hear it, say it, see it,
another taboo
burst open--
ripe pomegranate
of deeper secrets
waiting to come.

You were the bright orange sassy flower
in the field of browning pampas grass--
your scent alone blew the men away.
We wanted to taste those fruits,
plant their seeds in our gardens
not caring if they
grew or not,
only wanting to
get our hands wet
with the dirt
of those dreams.

Published in Convulvulus

 

© All Copyright, Leza Lowitz.
All Rights Reserved. Printed By Permission.