wildscape. literary journal

Unsexed
by C. Show

1.

I wish to duel Hamlet with more than my tongue.

I wish to penetrate him as I know my brother has (on the grounds by the brook).

After, Hamlet tried to kiss me with the same mouth that enveloped my brother.

After, Laertes lectured me against Hamlet’s advances.

Hamlet says, ‘I see the shape of something in you that tricks the eye.’ The name he whispers between my thighs is not mine, but how I wish it was.

2.

I grow what I can with what’s afforded to me.

Rosemary—such fragrant hair from forgotten graves—for remembrance.

Pansies—their purple faces fixed unblinking towards the sky—for thoughts.

The bodies each worm has turned into flowers are eaten up until their bones tell no sign of their sex. Bare faces picked beyond recognition, and I think in some future they might bring my skull from beneath the ground and take me for my brother.

(Or perhaps in some farce they take me for Hamlet).

I know not what they would say of my body—if that could be mistaken. I hear they call a skeleton’s sex by the angle of the hips, so I pray nightly in death my pelvis does not betray who I was in life.

3.

Hamlet and his madness stalks Elsinore in a way I understand because something akin paces within me. Unceremoniously, he plucked my future when his madness stole from me my father.

That supposéd marriage wherein I could play wife with the only man who would have me (myself the only one who would accept a mouth that fed from other springs) shriveled, a seedling dead from want of water. Now dust beneath my feet. Without, I cannot fulfill what passes woman. I am protected by no father (what names daughter), bound to hand myself to God in some form or fashion.

Thus, I dress myself in my father’s, my brother’s clothes and cut my hair with the dagger that took my father into the ground.

I sit in the willow, heavy with grief, working my fingers at a chain of buttery crowflowers, orchids, and nettles to drape when they call for father’s funeral rites.

That grief snaps the branch beneath me, plunging my body into water, swelling the fibres of my unfamiliar clothing, bare feet slipping o’er algae’d stones, grasping towards a light above, a life I cannot lead.

And they will bury a stranger. 

about the author // C. Show