Orthodoxy
My first language, water, was driven
from me by steadfast threats of sulfur.
Guilt stares at me from my ghost, yellow
holes in the head, hands, feet.
The hermitess on the river’s cleft lip
in her blue gown clean with mud
was hired as a beggar
and licensed to pray.
The long-separated souls of the mountain
lilies sing an antiphonal dirge for their bygone
petals. Faceless, the ghost rushes back
between my legs.
What People Say to Me When My Stomach Shrinks
It’s for the best—the baby would be taken away because you have DID.
Why did you believe you could continue to dance? Did you also leap?
You must not be quite strong enough. Maybe your vagina is weak.
This is the consequence of using birth control before. Maybe God
doesn’t want you to be a parent. Everything happens for a reason:
maybe this is your punishment; maybe it is a trial. It is irresponsible
of you to choose not to eat other creatures when your babies needed
your meat; life is about more than just you, you know. It was God’s will.
Was the miscarriage elective? You carried it wrong. At least you carried
it longer this time. It’s probably for the best—you might have hurt
your children because schizoaffective people are violent. There was
probably something wrong with it, and it’s better not to have a child
with Down syndrome or with conditions like yours. You can always
adopt; children in the foster system are troubled already. Maybe God
has other plans for you. You only had surgery on your uterus; you should
try harder. You can try again. Think of this as cleansing your system
for a real child.
Genuflection
Unable to balance them all in her own opened arms,
the ghosts of birds cling to her neck with stark feet
and razor beaks. She trails her fear behind her,
and as she winds down each red corridor
leaves a little tremor in every cell, an eternal string
of softly genuflecting blood
that does not lead back.
She is the wordless poet with white feathered throat;
the quill crimsons her gullet to regurgitate
the wrong writing. Known by her Latin name,
Hippomane, the little apple that makes horses mad,
she draws the North American forest into being.
She weans the next savior on the poison secretions
of the blue otter, leaves him beneath the manchineel,
his mother’s minor breast. Even the sap crackles,
blistering and blinding us.
The mother of all rises and resumes her journey.
Banished from too many worlds, she keeps silence,
yet echoes resound. They are the tantrums
and hunger pangs of the suckling God
left alone for this eternity.
Lake Angela is a poet, translator, and dancer-choreographer who creates at the confluence of verbal language and movement. She holds a PhD in the intersemiotic translation of Austrian Expressionist poetry into dance and has her MFA in poetry. She is a medieval mystic, beguine, and nonhuman creature. Her full-length books of poetry, Organblooms (2020) and Words for the Dead (2021), are available from FutureCycle Press. Lake is poetry editor for the international literature and arts journal Punt Volat and an executive contributor for the Swedish publication Brainz Magazine. As director of the poetry-dance group Companyia Lake Angela, she presents the value of schizophrenia spectrum creativity. You can visit her at www.lakeangeladance.com.