Three Poems by Elizabeth Austen
Her, at Two
Sometimes a bone
at the tender back of the throat
requires a wracking, indelicate
cough to survive it. Sometimes
a bone is plucked — still
fully fleshed —
from the platter and brandished
like a baton, a magician’s wand.
She transfixes every guest
gluttonous tyrant
in miniature. Is this how we all
began, thrilled to hold the meat
in our tiny fists, sure
the feast was laid for us
alone? Soon she will want
what she cannot reach
will be told it’s not for her
that’s not ladylike
wipe your fingers
put down the bone.
Oh, let her be lucky
and rare, let it be years
before her gender is learned
as limitation, a fence
to circumscribe her life.
For Lost Sainthood
because when the Virgin
appeared she said nothing
just waved less hello than
come this way
a third-grade girl a faith-fevered
fervently Catholic girl I longed
for sainthood
I pledged my unknown
ungovernable body
consecrated my virginity to Hers
but already I knew
I burned
before knowledge before
even the barest mechanics
before the trancelike tidal pull
of sweat and flesh
I burned I burned
and already
I knew
I was not good for all my hot
true tears when the host
was raised as Jesus’ flesh
for all my prayers and carefully
counted rosary beads I knew
I burned I burned
What We Would Forget
ties us to the past
and, like roots beneath pavement, cracks
the surface we would pass across,
though the tree lies some distance away.
Once heaved up and split
how can the path be smoothed
unless that living thing — we must remember –
is uprooted?
For these things sometimes happen. Though
the details differ, ours is not a unique story.
And if, as my lover enters me, my brother’s
face intrudes, what am I to do
but open my eyes and name this man
who is not my brother, name myself, who am not
that girl, and continue the embrace
of these our bodies, now?
No perception comes amiss —
my senses learned their scope
in that child-body. Who was I then?
And what of that girl lives tonight
in my skin? Do I carry her
always about me, ready to rise
and bind the present — this touch —
to the past? Will I ever say
the thongs are burst that the dead tied?
Lines in italics are from Virginia Woolf’s writings, as taken from Jocelyn Clarke‘s
play Room.
