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.
