Not a Beauty
JENNE MICALE
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Good thing I was never beautiful.
I have found other uses for ink and skill than the rim of my lashes. I have heard music in something other than my sharp voice. If I were beautiful, if I bowed my head to regard the stream I would only see myself, falling in toward an image dancing in light. And then I’d miss so much: the stealthy salamander sky-spotted against the muck the gray fingers of fish darting through the weeds and such weeds! So green they make the heart quake and shiver. I could even be envious of such a bright thing, since I fail to shine. They say there is virtue in ugliness, that it builds character in the manner of masonry. Maybe its sturdiness roots down to lift that twisted mountain tree. Maybe it threads under the forest floor to spring up the occasional mushroom, misshapen but endlessly interesting. Maybe it’s the rough rock that holds in its palms the memory of the very first leaves. Don’t get me wrong: sometimes I wish I were the shimmering bloom on the fragile stem and not the common eye that regards it. But on the whole, ugliness has been a gift, to be the subject of desire and never its object, to see the subjectivity in what surrounds, even the green carapace of flies feasting in a cathedral of bone. |
Nymphs
JENNE MICALE
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I can’t quite keep my languages straight
tonight. The meanings curve from lip to ear, and next thing you know a verb is rooting into a daisy and I have a mouth full of flowers, attracting butterflies, which seems like such an incredible thing in a literal sense: Who can believe a woman becoming a field of blooms? Apollo is probably involved, he often is in such cases, stories say. Some divine man has his desire thwarted and the next thing you know, you’re a tree with someone hacking off bits of your hair to award the sweaty winners of sundry athletic competitions. It’s just the way things are. You fall in love and next thing you know, you’re a cow running across Egypt, stung by relentless horseflies. Or you settle down to sleep as a cozy bed of marshy cattails. Next thing you know, someone is turning you into a flute. There are many stories like this, how you start from a common shape and your own magic twists you into something unexpected. The reverse is never possible: once you are changed, you are changed for good, and though pursuers may hack off bits of you — even a god -- you are no longer accessible for kisses and other harassment. You are something wild now, something feral that speaks in leaves and flowers and wind, something that answers the petitions of women and haunts the dreams of men, pulling them under the fountain’s broad lip. |
Jenne Micale lives in the woods in Upstate New York. Her poetry has been published in Enheduenna, Mandragora, and several anthologies. When she’s not scribbling, she is making music as the ethereal/wyrd folk project Kwannon, learning Gaeilge and practicing aikido badly.