Two
poems from Jaimee Hills's Symbolophobia
followed
by a note on the author
Lesson
on the letter S
S
is for sin. I knew what we were in for.
How could we exist without an exit?
He
called me his apostrophe, a she, his little rib.
What soul? What self?
I wanted to be singular.
In
the beginning, there was light, but it was slight,
a soft wan-colored swan,
a shallow lake to slake
our
thirsty throats, an often hallow place. But a slow hiss
announced itself.
The windswept willows wept.
At
thirty, my possessive ex and I were fruitful,
peaking naked, multiplied our
sex. But soon,
his
low snaked tongue, in speaking, forked
our sour sons, our daughter and myself
with words
of
swords and I returned, both cursed and cured,
ears seared with newfound knowledge,
turned
our laughter into slaughter.
Still
Life
When they unearthed my body, I was precious,
not for my pretty sapphires, which
I lacked,
but because life lay still in me. Precautions
were taken to keep
me there; I'd been locked,
this form in a coffin, but I'd been licked,
and
pried open. Theirs was a loathsome practice,
I thought, burgling the dead to
steal peace.
I'd rot soon enough without some precocious
anatomist cutting
me up to display me on his lectern.
This man walked the length of my hand,
punctured
my skin, hurried down to the quiet heart, located
my female parts.
He emptied me like a pitcher,
a pretty little teapot, pretty as a picture.
His
hands began to map a chart of living, looked
through me, learning, while my
insides leaked out.
He arranged my organs like fruit in a dish, all pinkish,
sketched
me quickly. Now my body lies likened
in a manuscript. I'd lived on. I'd lucked
out.
What great things I could do besides perish.
©
Jaimee
Hills was born in Plainfield, New Jersey in 1979 and earned her BA and MA in Writing
Seminars from The Johns Hopkins University, and her MFA from The University of
North Carolina at Greensboro. A former editor of Backwards City Review,
she now lives and writes in Durham, North Carolina. Her poems have appeared in
Blackbird, Best New Poets, the Mississippi Review, and elsewhere.
"Lesson
on the Letter S" first appeared in Blackbird; "Still Life"
first appeared in Best New Poets 2006.
