Self-Portrait as Skirtful of Hell
Never. Never. Not my real wife.
She’s my real witch, my fork, my mare,
my mother of tears, my skirtful of hell…
—Anne Sexton, “The Interrogation of the Man of Many Hearts”
am I the lonely wicked one / my mouthful of cicadas / jewel-green wings thrumming / constant
though sometimes / the song still rises & falls like / heatwaves like dreamwaves / my pocketful of
acorns & milk teeth / my handful of antler velvet & moss / not some flightless nymph / I am a
plague of wingbeats / always flickering in rooms with no / wind no windows / my eyeful of kudzu
vine & pokeberry / my earful of don’t go & stay / & more & more & more / I am a fever of never / good
enough heart humming / dripping & sticky with bees / my lapful of lanternflies / speckled skirt
trembling / ash- gray & flash of / red underwing smoldering / catching like live embers / then we
all go up
Daughter as Omen, as Nightjar
When my father asks me to call
more often, I rattle & rasp
like a rapid knocking against pine bark,
against the dark glass of windows
I mistake for the moth-feathered sky.
I don’t have a pretty song to sing.
I am a gaping mouth tucked
in the undergrowth—
a bird-shaped fragment of night,
a night-shaped hunger that sleeps
all day beneath the mayapples—
fern-owl, dew-hawk, briar-thrush.
When my father asks me to visit
more often, I come gliding above
the moonlit nettles, follow the ghost
of his voice floating low to the ground,
half-here half-gone like mist. I move
silently through the deep-green air
until morning creeps in at the edges.
When my father says he’s ready
to die, I know he’s already turning out
the lights, one by one—those night-
blooming bellflowers blinking closed.
But, little deathwish, I keep showing up,
churring from the tangled hedge out front
& he opens the door & he lets me in.
Lindsay Lusby’s debut poetry collection Catechesis: a postpastoral (2019) won the 2018 Agha Shahid Ali Poetry Prize from The University of Utah Press. The author of two previous chapbooks, her poems have appeared most recently in Booth, Coffin Bell, Epiphany, Copper Nickel, and Puerto del Sol. She is a Senior Poetry Reader for Cherry Tree and she edits poems at Tell Tell Poetry. With Amber Taliancich, she co-founded and runs Perilune Editing.