Erin Hoover
Given thee til the break of day
after William Blake
A mere hundred years I lived,
a woman trying her millennia
of threesomes, my clipper ships
full of whips and silk in long bolts,
malt liquor and floor mattresses
bearing the fruits of men. Honey,
you can put me down as earlier
than all those other feminists
still turning D/s—like my colleague
claiming research, my oldest friend
who texts me that the scene is corny,
though isn’t what we call knowledge
exactly that? Born in experience,
earned on these tits beat eggplant
purple as a low ass-thump
on the right cheek, then on the left,
on my ancient nipples clamped
so hard they give up colostrum,
like my every beloved quality,
ethereal, a little gross. A gift,
the starry floor, the watery shore,
twenty summers ago a man kept me
locked in a basement, raped me
on Egyptian cotton, and that has been,
almost, the sum of my life. Are these
words I’m holding? I didn’t cry until
I asked a man to stop bruising me,
and by our agreed system, he stopped.
Father, -less
On the topic a woman1 is apt
to be minimized. Sometimes we turn
to incest, which I won’t entertain
as I call bullshit on Electra2—call more
bullshit on penis envy—except
the implied negation of a spoiled girl,
mere provision evoking ruin. Latin,
spolium: skin taken from a dead animal,
English: spoils, plunder, booty,
but consider the kinder, gentler tack
of the language, “to become unfit
for use; to go bad, decay.” Female
as fruit, as egg, her mind consumable
foodstuffs. Thus: ruin from what?3
This ideal of virginity, a fiction,
however much I once believed.4
I should announce to my father
the deviance embedded in those funds
he saved for my college, point
to the dictionary as my evidence. I mean
the men in my writing program5
all wrote about their fathers, who often
hunted or fished and made them feel
inadequate. This sweet little feeling—
to be kneaded until bestowing truths
thought universal—shared, presumably,
by the male teachers that had written
of their own fathers in canonical books
of unquestioned value. The cycle
continues. You would think that all
had been said about fathers, perhaps
speaking to one’s father could be handled
privately,6 need not involve writing
a book, a novel, a series, writing
a play, making a movie, forcing us all
to discuss these manifest artifacts
of the patriarchy, its tedious
male ideas, tedium without end
and all the same endlessly replicating.
1. ... who writes about her father, who else is there?
2. Per the APA Dictionary of Psychology, “the female counterpart of the Oedipus complex, involving the daughter’s love for her father, jealousy toward the mother, and blame of the mother for depriving her of a penis.”
3. And, can sons be spoiled? Is inheritance a spoilage?
4. I would have been comforted by the historical obsessiveness of what exactly comprised its “loss.”
5. This specific membership is widely available, but also unnecessary to locate as their/our subject is so universal.
6. I’m aware.
Mary Biddinger
Rebecca Black
M. Cynthia Cheung
Joanna Penn Cooper
Isabelle Correa
Adam Day
Kendra DeColo
Lisa Dordal
Lise Goett
Camille Guthrie
James Allen Hall
Barbara Hamby
Rebecca Hazelton
Erin Hoover
Charles Kell
David Kirby
Keith Kopka
Cate Marvin
Marc McKee
Jennifer Militello
Jay Nebel
Kevin Prufer
M. Seaton & A. Smith
Diane Seuss
Martha Silano
Aaron Smith
Tana Jean Welch
Jeff Whitney
Jordan Zandi