"Haunting Marie Laveau"
Amy Pence
Three X's and the bones' rubble held aloft
on earth's marred and toxic surface. We lean in
to mark her monument--all three bracing
for different outcomes--a hex on the x,
agape. Hateship, friendship, courtship, loveship.
Voodoo happens though we lie awake nights,
undermined, breaking, coiled to our claws.
I fall into lurid dreams, roam among my wrecked
metaphors: the bruised hippie at the door,
an eyesore, shoving my ancestors' bones
back to make way for more. The past calls--
I crawl into the open maw of Marie Laveau.
Improv
We beeline for her double-D's blushing
under a see-through blouse. He didn't forgive her
breasts after all. Instead he let other
liquor-laden breaths ripple across the
ridges of her impolite stretch marks.
Virginity reeks elsewhere with busted
Madonnas that stand a tired guard on
Chalmatian steps.
Christine,
ReplyDeleteYour use of proper nouns and description qualifiers add imagery to your poem. The structure, although shorter than Pence's poem, mimics hers fairly closely in meter and abstractness. The adjective "impolite" for stretch marks seems a little strange to me, but perhaps it could refer to the personality of the woman being spoken of. I had to look up "Chalmatian" and then assumed that you or the speaker or the woman in the poem might be from Louisiana. Right? My favorite phrase is "Virginity reeks elsewhere" as it expresses the woman's disdain for the "He" of the poem.
I would like the poem to be longer and reveal more so maybe you could expand on it in a future posting.