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Poetry
by Erin Emily Ann Vance
Root Rot
After Ann Sexton
Ella, who ate bees,
stuck a butter knife in the sofa
pulled the stingers from her cuticles
atop a pile of brown, spoiled mattresses.
Am I some sort of mother to you, Ella?
Did I wipe mud on your cheeks and lick away your tears?
Did I make the breast milk curdle?
Did I tell you to wrap yourself in clovers?
Don’t do what I did.
Stay here with your bees and your stingers.
Drip congealed laughter into their lungs.
Show them the buttery wings that
fall into my crooked arms.
Croak like an old stove door.
Feel me in your hands like silk ribbons.
Show me a photo of the black lake out back.
Give me a transcript of our time at the inn.
Grow me a jack-o-lantern and let me wander out.
Fold her like the baker’s dough and let her twitch all night.
Flounder my pins on the old map in the study and let me go.
Did I lick you up like milk, Ella?
Did I eat up your insides of custard and sinew?
Did I give them the number to the cottage
where they found you cemented in gold?
Did I lick you like milk, Ella?
From the dead woman’s womb, fold, Ella!
You are the child’s backwash but ashes but nowadays
your lips are swollen with bee venom,
where
is the milk
I gave you?
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[Distillate © HA&L + Erin Emily Ann Vance | {from the Greek bios} -- the course of a life.]
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