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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

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