White Oleander

forever

never

response.

 

take everything

feel me?

the human condition

 

Stop

plotting murder

penitence

Cultivate it

 

you

forbid

appeal

 

rage

impotent

it's too

important

I

cringe

 

fuck

you

insane

person

dissonant and querulous

 

my

gas tanks marked FULL

 

I glued them to sheets of paper. I give them back to you. Your own little slaves. Oh my God, they're in revolt. It's Spartacus, Rome is burning. Now sack it, Mother. Take what you can before it all burns to ash.

 

27

 

THE CRYSTALLINE DAYS of March, that rarest of seasons, came like a benediction, regal and scented with cedar and pine. Needle-cold winds rinsed every impurity from the air, so clear you could see the mountain ranges all the way to Riverside, crisp and denned as a paint-by-the-numbers kit, windclouds pluming off their powdered flanks like a PBS show about Everest. The news said snowline was down to four thousand feet. These were ultramarine days, trimmed in ermine, and the nights showed all their ten thousand stars, gleaming overhead like a proof, a calculus woven on the warp and weft of certain fundamental truths.

 

How clear it was without my mother behind my eyes. I was reborn, a Siamese twin who had finally been separated from its hated, cumbersome double. I woke early, expectant as a small child, to a world washed clean of my mother's poisonous fog, her milky miasmas. This sparkling blue, this March, would be my metaphor, my insignia, like Mary's robe, blue edged with ermine, midnight with diamonds. Who would I be now that I had taken myself back, to be Astrid Magnussen, finally, alone.

 

Dear Astrid,

 

Bravo! Though your letter as poetry leaves something to be desired, at least it indicates a spark, a capacity for fire which I never would have believed you possessed. But really, you cannot think you will cut yourself free of me so easily. Hive in you, in your bones, the delicate coils of your mind. I made you. I formed the thoughts you find, the moods you carry. Your blood whispers my name. Even in rebellion, you are mine.

 

You want my penitence, demand my shame!1 Why would you want me to be less than I am, so you could find it easier to dismiss me? I'd rather you think me grotesque, florid with fantasy.

 

I'm out of segregation, thank you for asking. Waiting for me on my restoration to Barneburg B was, among other missives, a letter from Harper's. Oh the praise, ajailhouse Plathl (Although I am no suicide, no baked poetess with my head among the potatoes.)

 

Do not give up on me so soon, Astrid. There are people who are interested in my case. I will not molder here like the Man in the Iron Mask. This is the millennium. Anything can happen. And if I had to be wrongly imprisoned to be noticed by Harper's — well. . . you could almost say it was worth it.

 

And to think, when I was out, a good day was a handwritten rejection from Dog Breath Review.

 

They're taking a long poem on bird themes — the prison crows, migratory geese, I even used the doves, remember them? On St. Andrew's Place. Of course you do. You remember everything. You were afraid of the ruined dovecote, wouldn't go out into the yard until I'd prodded among the clumps of ivy to scare off snakes.