Sterile Soil

So I'm taking a Southern Lit class and I love it! I was reading A. Gordon Pym - Poe's only novel. It's very nautical, creepy, Southern Gothic... I decided I would write a poem inspired by Pym, but again out came a dead baby poem!!! I'm starting to play with the idea of the Southern Gothic and the human relationship to nature, nature as mother, giver, nurturer, but also nature as taker, monster, scary... how nature can mimic our lives, instigate our fears, how we parallel nature... the infertility of the land mimicking the infertility of humans, etc.

I know I'm rambling but these are where my latest work is coming from, and maybe how my older work can be justified academically.

Sterile Soil

Know that we did everything in our power at first

to keep the single egg entombed, my scarlet carcass,

a safe, but when the animals inside me began to feed,

I could not keep their black tongues at bay.

He tried to keep me from hating my womb,

whispering words like again, different, not your fault.

So we knelt in the blood and prayed for wet soil again,

a dark tunnel out of the hunger, seed that sticks,

but when the dead stayed dead we curled up

in the back bedroom for hours, in a deep stupor.

I begged him to lay on top of me, to bury me

beneath his body, to press his belly to my face

so I might want for air, so I might feel some comfort

in being so close to death. I wanted him to see me blue,

to know what it was like for a blue thing to come out of you,

but he refused, so we laid still listening to the squall outside,

imagining our children scattered behind the house.

Nothing but large fields lay behind us now, sterile soil,

and there is no conception, only stench

scissors, razors, shears, and brilliant blue

birds like shadows, sober and naked on the ground.