The End of Herstories
It used to be called senility
now Alzheimer’s, or dementia
but in Agatha’s case I’d choose
primary progressive aphasia
in which her language capabilities
slowly and progressively became
impaired as the author of more
than eighty novels lost the ability
to swim in the Alphabet Soup.
Postmortem textual analysis
suggests her vocabulary decreased
by fifteen to thirty percent.
And was her last mystery
“Elephants Can Remember”
an explanation or
a cry for help?
(for Virginia Woolf)
She wanted to buy some flowers but drowned Herself instead,
drifting along the ebbing flow of time, with warm
water cracking Her slim figure and airless lungs.
‘will I freeze the river?’ She thought, wondering if the trees
would still rustle in the wind if She wasn’t alive to notice it,
thinking if Her man’s heart would still beat if She could
no longer shock its rhythmical thump-thud-stop with kisses.
the wood was chopped down around Her home. The
veranda from which She surveyed the world was but
deafened by cruel hacking chopping and sawing at the
hands of men whom took Her feminine beauty away.
She became the water as She died, became the weeds,
became the bark that broke her own back, the pen and the phallus.
‘this isn’t purgatory’ She realised, ‘this is revenge and reward’.
‘I am a sacrifice to literature. I am a sacrifice for the word’.
from writer to death to glory to ink
to the lies under rocks uncovered,
to god to me to the taking of Her own life,
She is the paper in our very hands.
slithering through a suffragette smattering
the serpentine has no shoulder
on which to give
or have taken
piggyback rides through pantsuit criterion
so certainly lacks the same of which to dry witch salt tears with
whirling up and around then down up her ankle
thick thick thigh
deliciously dry coconut shunt
lipstick cracking
open pistachio shells
bravo to the mercenaries!
at least the split is red enough to pull the lever
and
spill how
women got their seat
at the
baccarat table