Not an Elegy
At the Appalachian rock shop on Diamond Street,
an aquamarine woman dusts with a large pale towel
the room decked in a giant spiderweb of heavy gauge
wire, palm-sized crystal-bellied spiders, red jasper
stone eyes. Jasper’s good for stability. In my house
the spiders walk vertically. They drop chalk-white
poop dots along baseboards. They kind of own the place.
A fucker bite on my shoulder, a week’s burn,
then they leave, I think of Hass’s translation of Issa.
When we write spider poems we almost always mean
our mothers. Yours caught you past curfew. Grannie unstirred
in the twin. You dumb tiptoed drunk, two heels in hand,
don’t turn on the lights, slow lift the covers, wet eyeballs
awake in an egg-white rage. A fucker of a beating.
But you never get pregnant, so who’s to say you weren’t a virgin?
With 400 dollars of rocks, we drag our dumbasses
to Rachel’s Roadhouse, order cabbage like it’s 1975.
Shrouded logs of meat and rice rolled in army-green
translucent leaves, dressed in watered ketchup
and stewed tomatoes. We eat. The waitress calls us girls
though we look all our 60 years, and in flannel.
Remember, feminism used to be short hair,
tampons, and pants, apologize if you’re wrong,
laugh only at funny shit? The Atlantic says feminism
was once ascendant – now over, the ascendency –
never made it to mainstream.
Aren’t you glad you don’t have to see it?
I finally threw away that list of passwords
you typed up. They don’t work anymore.
This is not an elegy. Here is a spell:
To the womb, the witch, and the woman,
muddle through.
To the tomb, the twit, and the tyrant,
Bella Ciao.
Dump the jasper stones
so they may roll
to the beveled edge of a table round.
Have the record player wobble a record
so we may sing in farce with the dead:
“Veng’ anch’io. No, tu no.”
For the tomb, the twit, and the tyrant,
tomorrow comes.
For the womb, the witch, and the woman,
tomorrow comes.
Daniela Buccilli’s poetry can be found in Prime Number Magazine, Watershed, Quarter After Five, Paterson Literary Review, and Cimarron Review. Her chapbook is What it Takes to Carry, and her co-edited poetry anthology is Show Us Your Papers (both from Main Street Rag). She has writing degrees from University of Pittsburgh and Carlow University. She workshops with the Madwomen in the Attic, teaches in a public high school, serves as her union’s secretary, and is the poetry editor at Northern Appalachia Review.
