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When the Storytellers Found Me
by Catherine-Esther Cowie

November 19, 2020 Contributed By: Catherine-Esther Cowie

Dark Forest
Image by Free-Photos from Pixabay

Most nights I don’t think of it, 

the blood on my teeth, 

 

my white dress, stained

with soot and wet grass,

 

how the mud hugged my feet 

like bedroom slippers.

 

I hid in the bush until 

the storytellers found me.

 

They enjoy the music of split-open things,

stretched my skin into a drum

 

until I sounded like hollowed fruit.

 

____________                                                                         

 

The first time God pulled

me into a body, I imagined

myself a fruit,

 

soft and spilling.

 

What if I am also the seed,  

hard white knot of a mango, 

when aimed can wound.

 

____________

 

Beat this dumb drum, 

beat this troubled song:

 

my skin, I painted red with clay,

my hair, I laced with lavender.

 

Even when the man hurt me,

my body could not forget

awakening.

 

I returned to rip the sun

out of his window.

 

 

We pitched forward in the dark;

he had the knife,

I was the ram

undoing him with my teeth,

our desecration darkening

his fingertips.

 

Each time I offered my body,

he grew a vision—

a rain tree,

the sky aflame,

children,

burning.


CATHERINE-ESTHER COWIE is from the Caribbean island of St. Lucia and has lived in Canada and the US. She is a graduate of the Pacific University low-residency MFA program. Her writing has appeared in the Penn Review, Glass: A Journal of Poetry, Forklift Ohio, Flock Literary Journal and Moko Magazine, The Common, Potomac Review, Southern Humanities Review, and Portland Review.

Filed Under: Poetry Posted On: November 19, 2020

Further Reading

Concerning My Daughter by Kim Hye-jin
translated from the Korean by Jamie Chang,
reviewed by Jacqueline Schaalje

The daring viewpoint of a homophobe widow makes for a toe-curling, but also hopeful read in the riveting Korean bestseller by Kim Hye-jin, Concerning My Daughter, dealing with the loneliness and ostracism of a lesbian couple and a single elderly woman.

The Right Way Home
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All night a knife sleeps in the sand, next to a monk eating an onion in the desert. The knife slices through the onion’s delusions. The monk extracts knives of various shapes and sizes from his chest, throat, shoulder; wipes off each one, dabs at the blood. He is so hard on himself. The knife […]

The Language of Shadows by John Sibley Williams

Act I Evening cannot fully digest its own seeds or come to terms with its darker progeny so choking on each bite it devours what came before, what it knows as simple prey. And day grows old in its father’s mouth until even upon a stepladder light can no longer reach the highest cupboards where […]

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