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Board Administrator Username: mjm Post Number: 4377 Registered: 11-1998 |
Honorable Mention Wedding Gown Boxes Mia i. Women I have known all my life self contained in boxes which came in one size: crippled ones with bent canes planted in rice paddies rows and rows of them perfectly fitted to squares, rectangles and plates; these women without hunger, or teeth or song, who knew only of labor and the assembly of purpose heat draining out of their skin; the blood of their sex rising up from open throat to protest turned to glass and shattered out of their mouths. ii. While naked women who hide behind the wheel and a loud voice and call it radical would know nothing of that place called fathom and how deep hate runs between barbed wire and random gunfire between north and south, called the Parallel; that place where no two points can ever touch one only knows loss of words, of husbands, of unborn children and machinery widows were made each day, those who understood sacrifice as the only form of escape; These women who spilled stars from their laps and became obsessed with cleanliness and denial wiped down walls, floors stained with birth, food and dark pools of blood with its smell of death. iii. Women I once knew, self contained in boxes and herded into compounds, quartered in rooms where light caves in; these women who disappeared into boxes, six by six, four by four and two by twos, in single file, who put them there? Not their fathers—but mothers who handed them over like a pair of broken wings with pearl handles. |
