Sara Femenella
A Brief History of a Fear of Men
When Ishmael held the knife in his own wound and twisted he was promised begetting. (I will make nations of you.) Since then we have walked willingly to our own destruction. (Walk before me and be blameless.) And if we are honest, it’s not what Abraham did that we fear, but Sarah driving us into the wilderness with our children, and how we let her and how we learned to do it too. (This is my covenant with you.)
Kingdom After My Own Heart
Saint Lucy was anointed thrice
by nine, her blindness offered 10,000
palms to serve us a martyr for all the seasons
we found ourselves straying from our saviors. I
will come back to you, I swore to my first love, my will
a clenched fist because I also loved my virginity, a come
along zealot drunk on bodega beer and kissing him back,
my purity a cheap stimulant that had me jabbering past curfew to
any darling who would listen to me buzzing. It ended like this:
one night on the lower east side I shattered the gauzy world
he built for me with his long and slender fingers. In
a city long buried, I still love him. Saint Lucy, a
knife to the neck. I’ve kept my cathedral light, my white
profanities, my girlhood dreams of soft cotton
sheets and bare legs. Since the first love I always dress
for the love I want. I do the least harm in a floral kingdom,
vintage blue jeans, crepe de chine. My closet full of
men who have unzipped my dresses all the way. After
all, what other way to armor pleasure. I know where my
bread is buttered: with every man I’ve ever loved I held my own
two eyes in my hand, two cut gems, two thorns deep in the heart.
Hysterical Fallacy
I beg the question. Your pardon? Patience
is a virtue burned at both ends. Someone once said
every poet has a love affair with a bridge
and I have two: the one I burned when I left a good man
for a city full of canals and baroque buildings.
The other I will cross when I get to it, but I’m sure
you saw that coming.
Still, when you think about it, all we ever do
is confuse causation with correlation. I mean,
I usually blame my husband. It’s not a secret
you can find a correlation for anything,
which is why when I took a night-train
from Saint Petersburg to Moscow I killed two birds
with one red-herring and my mother found God.
Twenty years later I still have dreams
where I smoke a cigarette in the arctic circle
with a buried hatchet on the tip of my tongue.
I remember Russian winters, eyelashes freezing,
a white-out of the soul. Anyway, I digress. Fair weather
antipathy and stolen amber. I’ve gotten stuck
in the past when all I wanted was to prove to you
I’m not that kind of woman.
Let’s begin again. I’m not that kind of woman,
all talk and fighting fire with a false alarm.
I’ll cry right to the chase, once bitten, twice
a fonder heart. See? You can trust me.
I’ll be your little canary.
About bridges, what else do you need to know?
Every bridge I’ve ever crossed is the same bridge,
correlating the number of trains leaving the station
at any given time and the fact that I have
a bad memory for faces. There’s a correlation
between wild fire smoke and the microbiome
of a newly flourishing coral reef. A poet once
said that the canary’s job is to die.
That’s what I’ve been trying to prove to you.
I am a warning, a sign. Don’t take me lightly,
I’m only a matter of time.