Two Poems
The Mother
My last, my least turned most favorite—
though I’ll deny it—because if he’s a devil
or a god, what could he need from me?
Hadn’t I suffered enough, having made
mothering a career, one I didn’t want,
but couldn’t leave alive. To curse him
unborn, body within my body. He was
part of me, my darkest part—child
of my ill intentions. With a soot-stained
heart, he knew how to fish an eye
from the neighbor’s apple-cheeked child.
Son who slipped into night, calling
like some haunted bird tree bound
or the field mouse gripped by death’s
groomsman. Guileless, all sinew, the steep
angle of jaw, a type of jaunt and lean
to him. That night, when he hit me,
bit me, thrashed the room, perhaps
I wanted to believe I could free myself
by giving him up. I’d recognize him
in the face of other boys, in the men
my daughters brought home. A little demon
in them all. Even my own face. Especially
as a young girl when I thought I was brave.
Little Black Dress
Simple frock cut above-the-knee
with shoulder straps at least two-fingers
thick, scoop neck, slight cinch at waist,
fabric that drapes. I’m not going to blame
myself or this dress, its little floral filigree
along the hem. Not a cape to be twirled
in a frat house’s black light to rile the bull,
to make him want blood. That animal
who gored me is a man, not some 1600lb
beast with a banderilla in his back. This
dress is dead. Pull it over my head and we’ll
burst into flame. Instead of a sabre through
his ticker, I want him to eat the evidence
with his hands, a Coney Island dress-eating
contest, stuffing the dry strips of cloth
in his mouth, or dipping them in lemonade,
which turns pink or brown from whatever’s
confined in the fibers. This isn’t a timed
competition. Everyday, he will eat the same
dress. Everyday, he will taste me and what
he did to me. Everyday, he will gag
on the tag, the small band of elastic. His one
meal because he wanted it so bad. Meanwhile
in the precinct basement, all of the clothing
locked up as evidence–jogging shorts, flannel
pajamas, cardigans, scrubs–thrash in a circle
pit, unfurling empty sleeves, so much rage
and shame to stomp, to peel from concrete
floor, to hold up to the room’s caged light.
About Emari DiGiorgio
Emari DiGiorgio’s debut collection The Things a Body Might Become is forthcoming from ELJ Editions. She is the recipient of the 2016 Auburn Witness Poetry Prize Honoring Jake Adam York and has received residencies from the Vermont Studio Center, Sundress Academy for the Arts, and Rivendell Writers’ Colony. She teaches at Stockton University, is a Geraldine R. Dodge Foundation Poet, and hosts World Above, a monthly reading series in Atlantic City, NJ.
