wildscape. literary journal

Cento for Gaza
by Beth Boylan

I wake up spitting nails in a bed of sweat 
(turned off the rattling air conditioner hours ago, 
still afraid of the dark and all of its creaks). 
This apartment full of books could crack open 
to the thick jaws, the indulging eyes of monsters—
fear tethers me to the fire. I was raised afraid 
of strange men, sudden noises, groups of men 
in the square, isolate men on the road.

Now the men have gone and made war again. 
Stolen land, pulled out their missiles to compare size
right there on the evening news.
Last night I watched women and children starve:
their brown skin hung in strips like ancient wallpaper,
their faces full-blown roses stained and lost through age,
flesh packed in like feathers, the big bones and the little bones,
holding a bowl of howls tricked into the porcelain night air
(how the grass sounds when the locusts come, like a spaceship
taking off and how it makes the air shake)—their hunger
clutched in the hands of the vile like a wilting bouquet, cut from their roots.

These women mirror rivers, seacoasts, volcanoes, 
the warmth of moon-bathed promontories— 
and where they once wept and laughed 
passed bark and root and berry from hand to hand, 
whispering each one’s power 
washing the bodies of the dead,
the stars will come out over and over 
the hyacinths rise like flames

and I will roll the nails in my mouth 
and begin the jagged music, when I not just grieve, 
sick and ruined, watching history not be history, 
but in the music not be music 
and the shame be shame be shame 
for all my little fears and books and pity,
my sunburned flab and the pristine white sheet that covers me.


  
This cento includes lines and phrases from the following poets:
Elizabeth Bishop (“The Fish”); Gabrielle Calvocoressi (“Captain Lovell, [“My eyes are shaky and glimmer like stars”]; “The Chapel, Now Quite Open to Its God”); Nikky Finney (“Fifty Thousand Dogs Slaughtered in China”); 
Andrea Gibson (“Orlando”); Marilyn Hacker (“Gerda in the Eyrie”); Adrienne Rich (“The Lioness”; “Sibling Mysteries”; “Nights and Days”; “Twenty-One Love Poems: V”); Evie Shockley (“the way we live now : :”)

about the author // Beth Boylan