Poetry Suite by Meaghan Ford
“I ran away and I’m not sorry. I found my heart in the crisper”
Poetry by Meaghan Ford
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Where Your Name Is Not Monster
There's an old yard that remembers
the sound of our feet, a herd,
a drum leading somewhere.
A laundry pole you taught me
how to climb 'til we could see all
the old neighborhood.
The houses, jagged and springing
up from the ground like birds before the flight.
Some dinners we made terrible
faces at our mother's back
while she stirred a pot, lit
the pilot light and prayed
for a small fire.
When you've got no money
you make your own games
and all of ours ended
in broken things. We ran through
alleys and garages breaking
windows with sticks,
spooked all the dogs 'til they howled.
They called us little terrors.
Children with savage mouths
and wicked smiles.
You've looked like the night for so long
I don't know your face without sinister
rouging its edges.
I don't know when you ate the boy.
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Nineteen
Did you know an abortion costs two hundred and forty-five dollars? I paid for my sister's second because we are all scared and poor in our own way. It was the same year a doctor told me that my belly would not be a home. I told my mother I did not want children but all she heard was: I do not want to be you. I stopped telling her stories. This was the year I decided you didn't count. That virginity is not something that could be taken from you. This is the year science failed me and someone said maybe your trauma damaged my cervix. Maybe that is why everything inside of me feels rotten. This is the year of not. The year of undoing. This is the year I ran away and I'm not sorry. I found my heart in the crisper drawer with the peppers and the red, red fruits. It wants to know when I'll be using it again. I wash it under the tap to get rid of the smell of old meat, dress it up in fresh plastic, and hide it away behind the ice box cake.
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If
If I tell, then fist
then scream and cry and not my son
home lost
brother not a brother
brother a vagrant dark
brother a traffic dancer
brother a bridge and a needle
brother dead.
If I tell, then father's
sleeping violence,
old bar rooms and broken knuckles.
father threw a man through a plate glass window once.
father two gunshots in an old van
father not an arm and an aisle
no church
father gone, brother dead
If I tell, then mother's grief
face crumpling,
mother all the baby pictures burned
mother let's make this work
maybe family
therapy and strangers
mother and all eyes
no mouths
haven't had a mouth in so long
forgot my own tongue
will please and please and please
stroke my mother's sad quiet
'til I find a roof and an opportunity
and gone.
If I tell, and they don't believe me
the biggest fear
the liar,
the little bitch
don't you know better
than to speak this beast's name?
don't you know how to make a hating of your voice?
a smiling jackal
an orphaned girl.
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Trigger
noun
1. the small tongue of a weapon that begins an explosion to discharge a gun.
2. rape joke. questions about why are you not home. Todd Akin. your rapist's smile.
his picture with all of the people you love. no more family portraits.
3. the first time I had a panic attack a friend was telling me about her own trauma. I wonder
how much longer I would have had repressed the nightmares, the memories, the flashbacks
had she not been so brave. I don't know how to apologize for not being able to help her.
for not being able to help myself.
verb (used with object)
4. my body is more than what you used it for.
verb (used without object)
5. I know how to trigger an explosion. Truth is a weapon and there are so many homes
that smell of gunsmoke.
Idioms
6. quick on the trigger, the involuntary reaction I have when approached from behind,
in the dark, by a lover, by hands, when voices are raised, when doors slam, when cars backfire,
when I am alone and silent and safe.
Origin
there is a bedroom that knows your sweat when it should not. all the ghosts live there.
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Dressing the One You Love for Burial
After Patricia Smith
Start with the feet.
It is disrespectful to look the dead in the face until
you are ready
and you are not ready.
Study her boots
the chapped hides, scaled and broken
in from so many meetings with the earth.
Heat the needle until it bubbles the blood
sew the leather to her skin
use the seams you were taught you as a child.
Now she is always a cowboy.
Dig up her mother's old watch in the backyard
the one that stopped thumping years ago.
Do not wrap it around her wrist
fold it into her palm
careful
to drape each finger around it, gentle
not a fist
this is payment.
You know the dress
the one the color of seaweed
skirt like a burst
that hugs her body like moving water.
Maybe she is just floating in the box waiting
for the waves to break.
Sneak in the pink, polka-dotted bra
that always peeked out the side of her nicest blouse
reminding everyone that she
was a woman.
The one that made you blush like soft peaches.
Stare at her collar bone and breathe
hesitate
Now.
Now her face.
Remember the mole at her temple,
the groove where she bit her lip.
Open her eyes.
She will want to see this.
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Header image courtesy of Laura Houlberg. To view a gallery of her collage about how femininity and rage communicate, go here.
Meaghan Ford is a writer from New Jersey who fell in love with the big city shit. She was a member of the 2014 Boston Poetry Slam team, the first Individual Northbeast Underground Champion and the 2013 Port Veritas WOWPS representative. Some of her work has appeared or is forthcoming in Drunk in a Midnight Choir, Danse Macabre, and the Write Bloody We Will Be Shelter Anthology. Like all good punk girls, she carries a knife.