the day we first used the word ‘annulment’
&
a definition of hope
Rowan
Tate
the day we first used the word ‘annulment’
i said i want to sleep because my tongue hurts, i am
tired of talking as if wearing my arm in a cast, one
written on then shed like an insect’s pupa, this place
where i attach my cobwebs of grief and spin them into
something i can lean against. if god would
grab me by the hips and tell me why he made our hands
to reach for things that hurt us like
the warm neck of the pot on the stove or
lovers that leave. i want to believe that when you cooked me that ragu
you were trying to make something of home but even then
i could sense our future selves standing in the room, regarding
that steaming lump of beef and tagliatelle as some sacrifice
slaughtered for the altar. my throat still burns
from that day i tried to swallow while the spoonful
entered me like a thrusting tongue, hot
with everything the minced meat heard you say while i was
singing in the shower.
a definition of hope
i cross the street but my soul
doesn’t, it lays there stout-solid like butter
too hard to be spread, thick with
griefs. i am waiting at the bus station for a man i call father
but have never really loved, i try on lives like socks,
fitting my spirit in as many letters as can write me
a biography of home. you have to cup your hands to hold me, drink
like it's a goblet handed to you from christ
with a kiss. if i were jesus, i would apologize
for my rage undressing itself, hot-breathed, almost
hallucinogenic with hormones as if
preparing to lay itself on the operating table and
give birth to something. but
i am a woman. they don’t tell you
that everything alive got here by breaking open a woman, and
i am a woman, i have eaten a whole cake in one sitting, a feat
befitting of someone in whose audacity you can walk around in, pointing at
all the things that should have tempered me
but didn't. i carry anger in me like a child. in some future I
will make of it something beautiful, but today
i am ten years old, i am waiting for my mother
to tell me she loves me.
Rowan Tate is a creative and curator of beauty currently based in Oxford. She reads nonfiction nature books, the backs of shampoo bottles, and sometimes minds.