In cages, closets, cellars, stalls
I count the ones who roost in darkness.
When an open mouth can only wail.
Jailer as wood devil with lantern eyes.
in a pit without heat his stumps in chains
“We didn’t reckon how cold it was,
and so his feet froze.”
Gentlemen, your eyes avoid mine.
You want to ponder railroads and the flood of Western grain.
Whaling, ironworks, textile mills, temperance.
When an open mouth can only alphabet terror
and stare with cod eyes.
About her waist a chain fastened into the wall
You rub your side-whiskers,
your ivory handle walking stick.
Held under water, choked, and kicked
We aren’t done here we are never done I have traveled through
swamps and over mountains in trains and carriages in tiny skiffs
and ferry boats with exploding boilers.
A woman in a cage, naked, beaten with rods
tearing off her skin by inches
Every cry is singular,
vowels exploding into the void.
Don’t leave the baby run in the mud gutter
Don’t leave the baby sit on the stove.
The weather is whiskey mountain and blood-swept stairs.
We oppose this bill because
The weather is children fevering in sweatshops.
Don’t scream on the baby.
Is pulley lines stretched from windows, patched laundry stiff with
swelter. Is white mourning clothes hanging from windows
if you are going to save the lives of these women and children.
The weather is yellowed milk and flies.
Sinks in halls, pipes belching smoke.
Glow of night taverns. Goats foraging in gutters.
Is cloak maker, potato peeler, ragpicker.
at public expense
Slop-pail, straw covered with bed tick, bone soup.
Peddlers’ carts and ragpickers.
The weather is Bandit’s Roost, Bottle Alley, Scrabble Alley.
The weather is child husks pitching pennies.
Smallpox, scarlet fever, measles, diphtheria ward.
what inducement will there be
Don’t leave the baby alone in the carriage and play with your friends.
Don’t give the baby sour cucumbers.
for young men to study medicine?
The weather is the mother explaining how she put her cold, wet feet
in the oven and then forgot about them.
Do most respectfully pray your honorable body to discharge
Me from this Asylum Being in the full possession of all my mental and physical faculties
If the husband chews sin
if he brews and bathes and wears
its scaly skin
if the wife sloughs off Calvinism
to preach a different Salvation
if sheriff husband doctor
if a three-minute exam catapults her to captive
if the wife craves paper
if it is snatched from her bed from under her shawl
if she pleads her sanity
on cloth from the sewing room
on newspaper margins cotton underwaists
if she pleads her sanity on foolscap
hidden behind the glass of her mirror.
Shiloh Bull Run Sharpsburg
the country thunders
gore without her
inventions whir without her
vacuum cleaner hand cranked
machine gun barbed wire pink lemonade
if the wife is a landscape of dark rain
sawing the edges so something will shift
Claudia Monpere writes and teaches in the San Francisco Bay Area. Her poetry appears in The Cincinnati Review, New Ohio Review, Prairie Schooner, Plume, The Massachusetts Review, and elsewhere. Her fiction and creative nonfiction appear in such journals as Split Lip, The Kenyon Review, Craft, The Forge, and Smokelong Quarterly. She received the 2023 SmokeLong Workshop Prize, and the 2024 Refractions: Genre Flash Fiction Prize. She will appear in Best Small Fictions 2024.
Images are from Daniel de La Feuille’s Devises et Emblèmes Anciennes & Moderns (1699)
