Custody
Something gritty and splintered intruded between my lips; my aired out tongue. Abrasive like an emery board. A flat wood stick. I gasped and awoke. My mouth was dry as a dying child. The rain came after. And sunk the woodpile deeper into ash. As if someone from another house—an orphanage perhaps—had claimed to be my family. He ate singed spiders crisped on the hot stove. My brother. His tongue wasn’t supposed to speak our language or be near me. Cigarettes were taped to the ivied brick house. In the black I hovered out the window to blow smoke from inside my lungs up to guilty stars. Away from trouble. And the weasel slipped in and out of the room like a sheet of paper let fall from a godhand.
Consume
My mother home from work. Me home from school. And I was quiet so as not to wake her. The darkened bedroom. Her sweet smell and the sheets. She had been fifteen once and chased through woods by a strange man. The sticks scratched her bare legs. She taught me to use pads. In her drawer was a belted thing I’d never use. The yellowjacket found a hole and slept with me. Stung my eye. My orange cat hugged me around my neck. When I was told I was fat, my mother suggested I drink broth when hungry. With her blue hands she melted animal gelatin for my skin and nails. I was frightened of my own bed. My note box stained my fingers every time I pried it open. It had never dried after I painted it black. Words adhered to my fingerprints.
Author’s note on this POSSESSION-themed poem:
I wrote these poems in a gush after reading some of Marosa di Giorgio's prose poems I found online. It was so coincidental because I was researching the "necropastoral" and came across her work (or maybe it was the other way around?). I know I had heard of her work recently because Lisa Marie Basile (Luna Luna's esteemed editor) had been praising her in posts on social media. After I wrote the poems I thought to look up synonyms for "possession" and found the words "Consume" and "Custody" and thought they worked well for the titles of my poems. Thank you Lisa for introducing me to Marosa di Giorgio. I have been "possessed" by her writing. Now I'm reading her book "I Remember Nightfall" which I ordered after writing these.
Jessica Purdy holds an MFA from Emerson College. She is the author of STARLAND and Sleep in a Strange House (Nixes Mate, 2017 and 2018), The Adorable Knife (Grey Book Press, 2023), and You’re Never the Same (Seven Kitchens Press, 2023). Her poems and micro-fiction have been nominated for the Pushcart Prize, Best New Poets, Best of the Net, and Best Micro-Fiction. Her poetry, flash fiction, and reviews appear in Action, Spectacle, Marrow Magazine, Does It Have Pockets, On the Seawall, Radar, The Night Heron Barks, and elsewhere. She lives in Exeter, New Hampshire.