Transfixed

So you see we begin by masking your face. 
You are not here anymore.
Your small body is collected up 
from the arms of your mother 
positioned and pinned:
Actias luna, Callosamia promethea.

The mind splits into hemispheres, body
into hemorrhages: outer lip, inner thigh.
Thought is draped, the body draped, especially there.
You would curl up tight but there is no hiding 
from the great radiating light
      of the operating room.

                               And when I awake 
silvery negatives float in my mind: a shining
sickle, fine scissors, the gloved finger. I find a hand, 
someone is across the air, ether ebbs
around among between —

Between what? My thighs?
Night has rammed a shaft of moonlight 
through me like a stake, I dance with angels 
on the point of a pin, pull gauze from a place 
I never knew existed.

Opened, riven, bled, and still
they speak of the center of creation, the man will write 
a certificate of virginity, what happened
never happened, I am fixed,
I am not dead, it is
           my lucky day.

After the Accident

I am sitting on the grown-ups’ bed, 
white lace around my throat,
white gauze between my legs. 
I am married now.
See the spot of red
on the Queen Anne’s lace.

I cut bandages, wind them 
round and round, a mummy. 
See me walking dead.
My sister is three.
They cut out her tongue
but she keeps crying anyway.
They cut mine too but didn’t tell me.

Mine, mine! I am six, I can tell time.
I have a name: I write it in the snow.

I go into the cellar to talk to my toes. 
Into the cave full of orange peel, 
maple tree, dog fur, apple.
Away from the open mouth with the teeth 
         from the You and Not and No

      I will not make a mess,
I have spent the night alone,
seen the white moon splinter its white bone, 
and angels gathering round
with steel fingers and gauzy robes.

Filled

A run-of-the-mill girl with ten fingers 
ten toes two eyes trying to figure
her place in the world making up stories 
with a king and a queen and talking to ants 
and her age was just right so she
stood at eye level	And the lord said
let her be filled	and she was	She became 
a receptacle for his work an ashcan
a shoe	She would be filled and emptied 
who knows how many times
how many years left slack
like a sack on the floor waiting for flour	It was 
her fault that her mouth hung open
How could she hold her head up
knowing the world saw only a hole	How 
could she walk when even the mother 
with her breasts had not stepped forward 
So what could she do except magic
what happened never happened 
It vanished in thin air banished 
to some grey-green backwater 
of memory and guarded
by the threat of her life 
where no one could enter 
and nothing could leave

Stream of Ants

I’m in another place shaking and breathless
trying to remember	trying to drink
long clear draughts of water like something 
piercing	ants pouring out of the brown sugar

Heat rises off the pavement
around the slight graceful people whose language 
goes so full tilt with trills and syllables
I stumble on it  	  lose my footing

I know nothing
but I smell the odor of something familiar 
rotting fruit	banana and coffee
peppers and squash shoved aside for America’s 
forklifted shrink-wrapped produce
Big enough to force what it wants 
down the throat of someone smaller 
colonizer to island
father to child

I am a traveler and my fellow travelers	we run 
from country to country seeking
the last land in which to be free	the last 
utterly wild place	the last territory 
inhabited by people untainted by our own 
my own	history

But always the same luggage 
Maybe he remembered or maybe 
he took one glance at the piled 
suitcases	a dark stairwell
and fled

Two a.m	cars rip up the streets 
What a sound system	what a bass
is it joy or rage
The doors are ajar	empty hallways	a stream of ants
drafts a sentence across the kitchen floor

A memory	I’m in high school and the boy has walked away 
to his two-tone Chrysler and joined
 the migration to the next state 
and the liquor store

Another memory	small stiff girl
squinting at the camera on the school steps on the bricks 
Look at us in our short plaid jumpers
blown even shorter by the wind	those dresses 
that failed utterly
to clothe us

He asked
if I was hungry   	       Oh yes
a hunger so deep it tears my chest apart 
the bars of my body
the nest in my ribs 
opened

I rest
in the arms of rustling palms	green hair
wound with jointed vines	I could have dark tight 
ringlets cascading down
rooted in some fertile place	and endless
birds churring across the lowering eyelids of dusk 
an indecipherable text
I have invested my life in learning 
other languages because my own 
is a burr	my tongue cut out

And the clothes I put on for the world 
wrap their stiff sheathes around me 
until all the unspoken words
clamber up through the skin and out 
Ants swarming

from the hard red pustule of their hill 
ready to take on anything
and go down biting

Janet MacFadyen’s third full-length collection, State of Grass, is forthcoming 2023/24 from Salmon Poetry, and will include all 4 of the poems here in Wordpeace. Her awards include a 2022 Massachusetts Cultural Council grant, a Fine Arts Work Center fellowship, and Pushcart, Forward, and Best of the Net nominations. Recent work appears or is forthcoming from The High Window, Naugatuck River Review, Osiris, Soul-Lit, White Stag, Writing the Land anthologies, and elsewhere. She is managing editor of Slate Roof Press.