Vacant

You are such a fucking liar.
Do not speak to me again of your travels and woes, I care not whether you come or go.
You want your presence to affect me and yet it does not.
My level of desire for you is the same either way,
Vacant.
Vacant
Vacant
My heart is vacant
Why must you torment me with your stories and lies?
You never loved me, you only ever needed me
you need to tell me that you’ll be here, hoping to be received well,
that I would reserve your place, making sure it is vacant
Vacant
Vacant
You never tell me what I can expect from you,
Although, it’s expected, I should know or expect nothing
your room is there, with a color tv
why does it than, feel so vacant, always vacant
Vacant
vacant
you have left my heart vacant
you treat me like a fucking hotel complete with maid and cooking services
don’t you wish the rent included the whore
you don’t want to talk, just fuck, sleep, eat and drive some more
leaving my heart vacant
still unfulfilled

How is this being together?
how does this make you happy?
what are you hoping for?
betterment?
and as you say you are getting better
what is happening to me?
I’m losing faith,
losing patience
losing control
so much I’ve lost already, in the wake of you,
my independence, my hopes for a sensible, romantic lover,
my dreams of stability, peace of mind, a kindred heart
all that you claim to want, you’ve cast away
leaving love vacant
vacant
vacant

By Taunia Rebel

Bonfire Night by Debi Crow

Bonfire Night

Paper flies to the fire.
Hair stings. Fingers gather up
a posy, a coin, a string.

The star burns down
to unreadable ashes.
The harvest swings at my hip.

The estuary wind sucks my skirt.
Water meets earth
with a whooshing hymn.

They splinter my door,
brutal and wary,
clattering into my room.

I have no cunning.
I am barely wise,
and definitely not a devil.

Yet here I am;
no more than driftwood,
and much too damp to kindle.

 

Inspiration for the Poem:

An extract from Gyn/Ecology by Mary Daly:

European Witchburnings: Purifying the Body of Christ

Just as social historian Baroja has recourse in the end to feeble psychologizing so also does moralist WEH Lecky in his two-volume History of European Morals. He writes revealingly (in the sense of unveiling and re-veiling at the same time) of the conditions that drove some witches to suicide:

In Europe the act was very common among the witches, who underwent all the sufferings with none of the consolations of martydom.

Without enthusiasm, without hope, without even the consciousness of innocence, decrepit in body and distracted in mind, compelled in this world to endure tortures, before which the most impassioned heroism might quail, and doomed, as they often believed, to eternal damnation in the next, they not unfrequently killed themselves in the agony of their despair.

This is a perfect description of the condition to which the lords of patriarchy desire to see defiant women reduced. It is an announcement of androcratic intent. How would Lecky know that the witches were “without even the consciousness of innocence”? The expressions “decrepit in body” and “distracted in mind” are deceptive because not accompanied by any description of the christian torturers’ methods.

On the following page, this “historian of morals,” having admitted the fact of unspeakable torture of witches, actually manages to write that “epidemics of purely insanesuicide…not infrequently occurred.” Lecky here refers specifically to the women of Marseilles and of Lyons. He then goes on:

In that strange mania which raged in Neapolitan districts from the end of the fifteenth to the end of the seventeenth century, and which was attributed to the bite of the tarantula, the patients thronged in multitudes towards the sea, and often, as the blue waters opened to their view, they chanted a wild hymn of welcome, and rushed with passion into the waves.

By naming this phenomenon a “mania” and failing to note the significance of the dates, Lecky makes its meaning invisible to most readers. Hags, however, knowing something about the history of The Burning Times, can see that this was a completely sane decision. Multitudes of women rushed into the sea, precisely because they refused to be “patients” for the witch doctors/torturers and chose to be agents of the one Self-affirming act possible under the Reign of Infernal Justice.

The words of the hymn , according to Hecker’s Epidemics of the Middle Ages (London, 1844), are:

Take me to the sea
If you are willing that I be healed,
To the sea, to the way
Thus does my lady love me,
To the sea, to the sea,
While I live, I must love you.

End extract.

by Debi Crow

Only She Remembers by Debi Crow

It’s inevitable
He’ll deny everything, of course he will
He wasn’t even there, he’s never seen her before
He only bought her a drink, and then
the silly bitch drank too much, didn’t she?

He wasn’t even there, though, so, you know, I don’t know
What are you going to do? Accuse
him of something? He’s never seen you!
What are you going to do? What are you going to do?

choke, stab, choke, stab, choke, stab, choke, stab…
There is a life in there, but where, but where, he
pulled it out and laid it in the air
Stretched it over the bonnet of his car
and rode her, bragging into her hair…

Telling of the affair, and pulling at her hair, until
she’s choked and stabbed and Only She Remembers.

by Debi Crow

Poem by Debi Crow

Youth is innocence
Age is beauty
If we can age in our
own bodies, in our own
skin
Unaltered, unadulterated, untouched
by the dogmas of patriarchy,

We can truly subvert.

That ageing in ourselves and as our Selves is an act of subversion
is perverse, but
subversion it is, and
subvert we must.

I subvert and we subvert.
We re-fuse, and re-
wire, re-connect and
re-define

beauty.

by Debi Crow

Hagar and Sarah by Jennifer Wildflower

Hagar:

Hagar tied a knot
and slipped through it

she tapped her
skull to
her son’s

and together they
dipped into the
river of life.

She could lead a battalion
to a place of
naked peace
if not for her flesh,
wrapped in butcher’s paper.

She was unvisited by grace
and so she spelled it out
in the sand.

We are rent from her now,
God’s own beauty

strong only by breaks
in every conscience.

Sarah:

Sarah
you know you
are the one
broken lines
make straight in your wake
and
synonyms are hushed.

Sarah made of fathers
blood and
wooden temples

you are my mother
horned or winged
I am in love with you.
Sara is flexed
she is taut as gums
she is ready for
the king’s house
the new testament
and ungodly pain.

Sarah you could
rule us all
but you lay down
in dirt and
said:
‘action’.

When the body collapses
Sarah alone remains
to taste and see
what damage you have done

she will set your face beside stone
and call you beautful.

My piece is a tribute to Sarah and Hagar, women of ancient times. Their story is known well by most women of Jewish, Christian and Muslim backgrounds. Sarah and Hagar were wives of Abraham. Their descendants are Jews, Christians and Muslims. Muslims are said to be the descendants of Abraham and Hagar; Jews are said to be the descendants of Sarah and Abraham.

I wrote these poems one right after the other, as an attempt to stand squarely in the midst of illusory divides between women, divides which are age-old, enforced dichotomous paradigms that were meant to and do divide and conquer womankind as a class.

These dichotomous paradigms are meant to divide us from each other and to divide us from our selves.

They include the notions of the virgin and the whore, the pure and the defiled, the indentured servant and the slave, the childless and the childbearing, among others. All of these states and titles are, in varying degrees, the exact same thing. As long as they are accepted, promoted, or indulged to whatever degree, no woman is free.

by Jennifer Wildflower

Unspoken Word by Ami Mattison

by Ami Mattison

She is Risen by allecto

This poem is dedicated to Rebecca Mott because she inspired it. You are an Amazon, Rebecca. Don’t you forget it.

She is Risen

Sing to me, siren
Of the night
Let the melodies take you
Distant tunes in the dappled light

The faithless drifting
Whilst I am caught
In a song and her eddies
With the lost and once-owned.

And she rises
Shaken from the seaweed
Riding the cantankerous waves
Of these times

Singer of the mountains
Singer of the sea

Sing to us of morning
And the mourning
That has come.

Those faithless
Blinded still.

Unwavering,
The moon still turns the tide.

She is risen.
She is risen.
And we remember her.

Sing to us now
Of the Amazon who was
Many memories
Fallen by the way

Bring them back to us
With sword in hand
And light of truth

Ease the stars
Back into the night
And wake me ‘fore the dawn.

She is the Warrior
The Storyteller
And the Muse

Walk with her
Into this darkness
And believe.

by allecto

Stormrunner by Embyr Arrikanez

Lightning struck the Earth and she was there,
Standing with her arms full of children of all skins and races;
& her hair ran black with all colours, crackling
Like the fairy-touch of a gentle lover along a plump thigh, or
Tender smiles half-felt along cheeks in the darkness, and
Her legs were red with life;
And storm-born she ran with the wind
Until wanderlust turned her feet back to the cities
She roared at the top of her mind and charged,
Motherous and wildish at-for the world;
& she was tall like an Amazon,
350 pounds of solid muscle; a jaguar who pounced
On the forbidden secrets that Man had hidden from her sisters
And took away in her powerful jaws Truth.
 
by Embyr Arrikanez

We will not slumber until every woman wakes by allecto

This is dedicated to Heart from Women’s Space because she is a sister. Because she is brave and strong and tireless.

Love and peace to you, Heart. This is for you.

***

The world breaks open. Underneath the layers, transcending the past, making the present.

I have seen it written. In the hour of our forced surrender. The world will diminish as the time draws near.

Aching with the lost and ancient tidings, her beginning has come. Rekindling our magic. Lusty, wild and untamed. Recalling to us a time when freedom was a word that had meaning.

Do we have her power? This one that calls to us. Cries out long forgotten secrets. Screams our true names. Falling silent as the moon wanes. She is the one that tells us of the future.

She comes in before the dawn, when our power awakens from the stealthy sleep of those who can ill afford dreams. When half of our world is drowning beneath the man-made weather, whether, weather. When half our world is starving. Sacred ground as dry as dust.

Speak to me of your power. Speak to me in riddles, in a woman’s tongue. This day is coming into being and I need no translation. I can feel you breathing, sisters. The calm static before this long-awaited storm.

Our storm.

We have been without our rain and thunder for far too long…

I smell the tumult of our revolution, rising from the east…

Come to me then, in fury and in rage and with warmth. I will not let the cold decay of this bleaching rancour. I will not let this mindless, bloody, relentless torment hold me any longer. I am breaching the walls of this prison. My love, my heart, myself within my sisters. My sisters in me.

Even death cannot strip us of our elemental power. We sisters do not fear the earth.

Listen to the seasons. Listen to the earth beneath your feet. Breathe with the beauty of her. Sing it out. Sing our tempest into being. And as the storm of us gathers on the horizon, know this. We will not slumber until every woman wakes.

Let the rains come in with the tide. Beat out a rhythm in women’s time. And let us soar.

by allecto