Poetry Suite by Ava Serra
“Where are the robes, the gavel of Lady Law?”
Poetry by Ava Serra
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The Unnaming
May the mortician’s hand slip as it cuts into your flesh,
slices your deli meat heart.
Let them ponder
how to make makeup fix your fists.
May the nameplate fall off in the AC wind.
It would grace you
to bear the name of another,
but I’d never wish your legacy on any corpse
better unidentified than your name,
better burn the atria than open valves of scorpion venom.
May there be a revolution against your tombstone,
a wrecking ball through the carvings,
cement over the years you walked between lakes. You terrorized
since the age of John Lennon, took inspiration from the gun –
remember how you held it to my spine?
Finger cool on the trigger at sunset.
I hope you fear every sunrise and the rays breaking through trees.
May the scalpel slip into your chest,
the tar within spew and bubble out, black magma.
May your name never mar this page or the next.
Consider it a dishonorable discharge from a history book
The one you wrote for me is ash in the sky,
you are grains sinking into an ocean.
May they know no light.
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Amendments for the Judge
I.
It’s a quarter before too late in the chamber,
wedged in the wrinkle between then and now.
I’m not sure if there are windows, less so of my own tongue.
She asks me for my truth and I know less on that
so I translate to fear —
the fist on the kitchen wall
the thump upon my brother’s skull as we waited
for pizza and peace
the fingers up my stomach, too far, too far —
II.
Where are the robes, the gavel of Lady Law?
She is a woman like my mom, with stitches on her mouth,
my teachers who tell me I am lucky and loved,
these ordinary people who do not see
me shedding skin seams, flower flesh flaking
so someone may adore me.
Save me, I mean. How
do I tell this woman
it rains, sometimes, in the house?
Sometimes mom’s eyes sprinkle, sometimes a monsoon.
Sometimes I dive headfirst into a porcelain pool and await a reason to come up
I will almost drown waiting. I will not care.
III.
And how familiar it was to confront a tornado at six.
Not an escape to Oz – I caught the house on my shoulders
and grew with it there.
Never an Atlas, never an Alice, not close to Alexander:
this is the position for a mythical leech,
great vermin. Which mask does he don in your land?
Do you also fear the teeth of his smile?
IV.
This is not a time for questions. I’m to tell you how
mom prefers brains on the sidewalk to family dinners.
There’s an echo chamber forming in my mind.
The bats have gone. The bats may be extinct.
The tectonic shift rattles.
I am fluent in echolocation and no language.
V.
Today she requires my testimony
forgetting that neither of us can predict a cave collapse
or Yellowstone’s apocalypse.
It’s how do [I] like my parents and not
how many ways have you learned to tie a noose?
There’s no vacancy for me to say
This is how it feels to crash without a helmet
This is how the kitten feels when a deluge fills the machine
The racoon turns its head straight into the car crash
The corset squeezes the stomach into the lungs
To have stone close in while the emperor laughs
To have cement dry in the mouth
To watch as the guillotine drops on the head before
See the shark and forget how to swim
I think
VI.
This is how a fly feels in the flytrap:
to glimpse forever blue through slivers as
acid boils through
flesh and wing. Even in here,
there is his reminder of childhood
bribed away with pancakes, apples with the skin off,
a tug and tangle of his ropes.
Miss, can’t you see the puppet
strings? The puppet hands around my neck?
VII.
Do you see a fanged behemoth in a pink shirt, blue jeans?
I check my reflection every day to a lie,
so my Geppetto says. Tell me,
is it normal to have volcano veins under a glacier?
No,
this is not a stomping ground for my question marks
the bang, thump, slip, my cloak of ice, my lightning
strikes over and over and
VIII.
I don’t want him in trouble.
I don’t know what follows the storm.
My legs tremble even between the earthquakes
and mom’s afraid of heights,
so how can she reach me on this skyscraper pedestal
where I see the world, but the world doesn’t know me?
What does the country smell like outside the chimney?
I’m afraid out there is where the air ends
so, to answer the question
IX.
I tell her with my transplant tongue:
Label me endangered.
Put me alongside the tigers.
Hurricanes happen to everyone,
don’t they?
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Header image courtesy of Ervin A. Johnson. To view his artist feature, go here.
Ava Serra is a queer woman with Puerto Rican and Italian roots. Aside from writing projects, she is working on a B.A. in Environmental Science at Northwestern University in Illinois. For introducing her to poetry in 2016, she is immensely grateful for C. Russell Price. Since that introduction, her poetry has been featured in Lavender Review (to be released spring 2019) and POSTSCRIPT. She was also a finalist in the Gwendolyn Brook Open Mic Awards in Chicago, where she dwells and frequently performs.
