The Anchorite
And how the hinges bit me
when you shut me in the cupboard
to board her, broad and bright as a small craft,
bobbing as you learned on her.
I rued her no beauty—all of that was closed with me,
doubled over in my dress.
And you found me again, fell drunk on my door:
I had no time to pull the sap up to my cuts,
nothing to show for that year apart:
not tokens earned at love or some trick of the body,
or even a new language to set puzzles in.
And that decade you locked me in the cellar,
dancing on my head with your guests, bricking me
with pickles and the sweet wine that dripped on me.
The beetles gnawed me sore for that--
I went mad under their frilly toes, the eyelet of the light
through the tiles changing with your weight and hers.
The gourds were inflated and taken,
their starches mounted in jars like freak limbs.
And you pulled me up by the heel,
pinafore over my face, like the saints of certain cults
whom the earth cannot digest. My heart was quiet,
the old irons slower now: I, too, had been cured,
like the eggs the Chinese bury, in the brine of the dark,
the brackish rain off the slate where you lived, above.
I was a new thing to you, found, a curio worried smooth--
one marvels at the violence it needed to become just so.
But the nerves fatigue from one note, and mine
is the pang of surprise at a creature stopped entirely,
as if in amber, legs folded a little under it.
It can only be trapped, not rationed through a common life;
it is a spectacle brought out for company
like a daguerreotype that still holds the old faces.
Familiar things are like this:
they can amuse you only shortly before burial.
Even the ancestors must have new sweets in their shrines,
the marzipan ether sucked to crumbs in their smoke-mouths.
T. M. De Vos completed her MFA at New York University in 2004. She is the recipient of a Summer Literary Seminars fellowship and a Hopwood Award from the University of Michigan. Her work has appeared most recently in Gloom Cupboard, Painted Bride Quarterly, Tidal Basin Review, HOBART, Dossier Journal, Pittsburgh Flash Fiction Gazette, Bosphorus Art Project Quarterly, Sakura Review, The Whistling Fire, Shady Side Review, Umbrella Factory Magazine, and the Los Angeles Review. She is a staff member of Many Mountains Moving, a performer with the Poetry Brothel, and a contributor to Fiction Writers Review.
And how the hinges bit me
when you shut me in the cupboard
to board her, broad and bright as a small craft,
bobbing as you learned on her.
I rued her no beauty—all of that was closed with me,
doubled over in my dress.
And you found me again, fell drunk on my door:
I had no time to pull the sap up to my cuts,
nothing to show for that year apart:
not tokens earned at love or some trick of the body,
or even a new language to set puzzles in.
And that decade you locked me in the cellar,
dancing on my head with your guests, bricking me
with pickles and the sweet wine that dripped on me.
The beetles gnawed me sore for that--
I went mad under their frilly toes, the eyelet of the light
through the tiles changing with your weight and hers.
The gourds were inflated and taken,
their starches mounted in jars like freak limbs.
And you pulled me up by the heel,
pinafore over my face, like the saints of certain cults
whom the earth cannot digest. My heart was quiet,
the old irons slower now: I, too, had been cured,
like the eggs the Chinese bury, in the brine of the dark,
the brackish rain off the slate where you lived, above.
I was a new thing to you, found, a curio worried smooth--
one marvels at the violence it needed to become just so.
But the nerves fatigue from one note, and mine
is the pang of surprise at a creature stopped entirely,
as if in amber, legs folded a little under it.
It can only be trapped, not rationed through a common life;
it is a spectacle brought out for company
like a daguerreotype that still holds the old faces.
Familiar things are like this:
they can amuse you only shortly before burial.
Even the ancestors must have new sweets in their shrines,
the marzipan ether sucked to crumbs in their smoke-mouths.
T. M. De Vos completed her MFA at New York University in 2004. She is the recipient of a Summer Literary Seminars fellowship and a Hopwood Award from the University of Michigan. Her work has appeared most recently in Gloom Cupboard, Painted Bride Quarterly, Tidal Basin Review, HOBART, Dossier Journal, Pittsburgh Flash Fiction Gazette, Bosphorus Art Project Quarterly, Sakura Review, The Whistling Fire, Shady Side Review, Umbrella Factory Magazine, and the Los Angeles Review. She is a staff member of Many Mountains Moving, a performer with the Poetry Brothel, and a contributor to Fiction Writers Review.
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