Eve Responds

I am identified an enemy in my home.
Can’t do anything right. My very name
bad. All babble, all violence.

Even this violence won’t negate all
I cherish since I left: herons
and shooting stars, cattails and rooster tails,
the damp dew on the last stalks
here, outside the Garden, along the banks
of the slough filling with grey water
under a gunmetal sky. All I have left
after work with other women trying to leave.
The battle out here fragile as a bone,
a collarbone, say, or a wrist slammed
against a wall, my neck, for instance,
never the same
and the hole in the plaster
a wound in the wall
a ghost in the house hidden
by the makeshift coat rack he made
before selling the place. Still there,
the violence, the exit.

Lord, don’t judge what I need
who I am in this life of desperation.
Wine to kill the pain, sex to kill the pain,
needles, tv. I know it, I know all of it
and it’s all violence, babble, enemy.
Unleashed from the Garden
kneeling on the banks of the slough
I live yet.

Jenny Root

She Speaks

        In the United States a woman
        is beaten by a man every 18 seconds,
        interrupted every two.

It’s not as if she never speaks.
Her words fly from her
to the treetops, there whispering.

It’s not as if she never speaks.
Like the timid touch of a beaten woman
her words shake, desire

to be heard, to be known.

The synapse between a woman’s thought
and words attempted—interrupted—
pulses with a palpable heat.

What becomes of a man
who denies a woman
the power of words?

What becomes of a race
that abuses the words
of half its human face?

We have poems
we will never know—

it is our voice that is denied.

***
It’s not as if she never spoke.
Her words linger when her voice
is gone—beckoned
by the muse that listens
to dry leaves rustling in the wind.

Jenny Root