Poetry by Renwick Berchild

            Jo Guldi CC



​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.     


 


Swirl

Benjamin Franklin has wooed my grandmother
with his three-piece silk suit and shiny bald head. 
I never wanted a living man she says, weaving her fingers 
through her corkscrew white hair. 

I want to ask her about sex; I remember girlfriends
on the bathroom floor holding up mirrors to their vaginas, 
shaving their forearms, grabbing hold their stomachs, 
hands squeezing at the clumps. 

               Prisoners who make knives out of paper and saliva, 
                   spit and cut, 
                             spit 
                                  and cut, 
like Indonesian swifts building nests inside a cave. 

My grandmother’s spacious eyes are crystal balls. In them 
I can recall the howls of veiny men, with crocodile tears
hot red, lamenting over untilled soils 
spilling into my bedroom.  

Area rugs swallow up the dirt they left. 
How many women long for dead men? For massless, 
wispy vibrators of bellies, chests, calves? Spooky kings 
laid out flat over their peach chambers and striped rooms, 
soaking their crying blood up 
like mops with embroidered ends.

Why does grandmother long for a ghost? 

Her fingers grip the sewing needle, her hands 
chop potatoes for dinner 
while grandfather reads in his chair, 
she files her fingernails,
she tweezes the whiskers from her chin,
uses a glinting razor to strip smooth her hairy legs

             —to wield 
what may stab and prick her, she aches
for a specter’s lithe hand to brush her closed curl,
caress her creaking knees, cup her squeezed head,
softly softly swirl the nape, of her tired, bent neck.  

​

Renwick Berchild is half literary critic, half poet. She writes at Nothing in Particular Book Review, and her poems have appeared in Headline Press, Whimperbang, ISACOUSTICS, Spillwords, Vita Brevis, The Stray Branch, Machinery India, Lunaris Review, Streetcake Mag, and other e-zines, anthologies, and journals. She was born and raised on the angry shores of Lake Superior, and now lives in a micro-apartment in Seattle, WA.

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