Indomitae
Call with me. Let us catch lightning bugs in our opened mouths.
Take on the hills, cut off our right breasts like Amazonians,
draw our bows, make the Greek winds flux and invert, blow
off our manes; let’s go, unshaved and ugly—Hail Freedom!
Women, I beckon you, to throw your men. Our feet are cracked
and hardened, in need of pumice stones, but they know the roads
better than Timberwolves, better than caribou, better than stray cats.
Sainthood? Not for us. Mother Teresa, bless her, but I don’t care.
I’ll wrap my motherhood in a plastic tarp, dump her in the river,
a careening seed off a sugar maple crashing into the Mississippi.
(She’ll spin wild before she hits, and I’ll relish in the whistling.)
She’ll not tell of my extravagance, my sex filled dreams, unholy
thoughts of beating in children’s brains, dying for the crib
to tip over and plunge into the mud-plagued snowdrifts outside.
Women,
if we rode together, 3.8 billion steeds straight to the steps
of the Vatican, nuns tossing down their habits, supermodels ditching
their lingerie in the streets, ten million copies of Lolita in a bonfire,
quartering baby dolls and tossing their limbs about like confetti
I’d bet God would be shaken. I bet men would piss their pants,
Artemis would come crashing through with her wild dogs, turn
the rapist boys into bleating deer and have them devoured alive.
Hsi Wang Mu would wake up, bare her tiger teeth, flick
her leopard tail, leave her jade palace in the Kun-lun mountains
and come scream-stomp-seizure-spasm with us. Women, my girls,
sisters aplenty, I love the thought of us—The Battering Ram.
First published in Anti-Heroin Chic February 2021.
Renwick Berchild 