CELIA’S CONFESSION
Celia was purchased by
Robert Newsom at the age of fourteen.
For five years he forced her to have
intercourse with him on a regular
basis. At the age of nineteen she bore
his first child. When she was pregnant
with the second, and very ill, Robert
tried to force himself on her again.
She resisted, warning him that she would
hurt him if he continued to rape her
while she was ill and with child. He
ignored her. Celia beat him in the head
with a stick, burned his body in the
fireplace, and spread the ashes on the
ground outside of the house. Celia was
tried for murder and, in 1855, was
sentenced to death.
I have abandoned windows
and listen only to
parrots.
I wish this dead girl
skin
were snow or soap and
that I were not shut up
in sleeves and daylight
and speech.
These are my iron bright
dreams
of knives and purple
wools,
the violet and golden
gray of them,
Their violent peal out
from my sleep.
The wild bluesman black
of them.
Their drumming.
Their rough
determination.
Some women can still sing
in the exhale of cannon
breath, sing
while fingernails
hieroglyph their breasts
and thighs and sing
while, like the gods,
they sip ambrosia from
their palms,
ambrosia sweet like pus.
But I, I cannot. In
fact,
I am tickled by the
suggestion, sir.
I know it is all about
dollars and cents,
this skin with its
signature of tyrants.
That is why I bludgeoned
and burned him,
pressed his ashes into
the ground
black with rainwater and
spit
his father’s spit, my
grandfather’s spit,
his mother’s, my son’s,
the ground,
my feet.
THE DILIGENT
We sit like dolls
awaiting baptism, all robed up
in bare skin, like
missionaries, shoulders fisted,
fingers braided fierce
like calligraphy.
We contemplate prayer.
Along with our mothers
and grandfathers, we are poured
oily into that green wood
stomach and iron throat.
After a silence
and the shucking of
manacles, we are a garden of skins,
of skins and thighs and
fingers, lips, thumbs,
a moss of bones and
genitals
all pressed together,
thick like soil,
wet, in a lather of feces
and blood.
The applause is from the
whips. The whips. The whips, their
clapping
against the whips,
flagellum sliding under the buttocks or
into the shrug of the knee.
Even the wise children
die here, ribboned and tangled in mold,
their throats phlegmed
shut with a swollen heat.
And we, the mothers,
abandon them quickly.
We forget their names.
A dozen of us trade in
royalty for daylight.
We are tattooed for
whispering confessionals to a sky.
We are a pyre of stale
limbs
and flesh like mandrake
leaves
iron-singed, black,
scabbing, settled.
LA CANCIÓN VERDE; or, AT
A POETRY READING IN MADRID
There is in her voice,
after all,
bent in a long stretch,
bridled up wild wind in
her throat
There is in her voice
poetry
that tastes like green.
Shhhh.
Listen. It begins
one white strike
against the belly of a
yellow guitar, crawling up
up and out of the
fingers—the guitar—
and the voice—
the cancionera,
she gathers it up, like purple
ritual and she places it
between
the strings of one single
guitar
And we wait
We give up our eyes and
every other breath
we forget to take and we
wait
we wait for the sound in
the pauses
A Cassells poem
the aftertaste of that
poem
the resin of it thick,
gelatinous, the taste
still roiling on my
tongue.
Quiet.
You will miss the sting
of it,
the sharp pierce and
spread of it
through the skin like
a wound the cancionera
looks at me for a moment,
head bent slightly, right hand
lifted into a stretch,
and in the stretch she asks me to
relieve her
of the music in her
throat.
I am forgetting the other
things. The sweat. The itch.
The pinch of the spine. I
am forgetting those things.
I am listening only to
the ashy pluck
the thin echo of the last
string.
