Salome and: Painted Dolls of Martinique and: Letters from Madinina and: Address to the War Council
Buy Issue for $25 at JHUP- Salome and: Painted Dolls of Martinique and: Letters from Madinina and: Address to the War Council
Salome
—After Adrienne Kennedy
X who is Salome who is the Bedwetter who is Josephine.
Twin-bed & plastic sheet as ice cream sandwich & paper wrap.
Other children portrayed as sunflowers.
Act I: Mattress propped on artist’s easel faces audience. White sheet stained with urine. Think bulls-eye, think square egg. X in dreamlike state contorts around spot, spelling with body, in any order: IRIS, FOLD, & BATHE
Act II: Mother pulls sheets from under X. Continues to pull sheets throughout the next seventeen years. X opens many books during the interval. X cuts off legs, pulls self on hands through doors left open.
Act III: X paces her high school in inscrutable blue jeans. Columns of sunflowers follow her progress with slow yellow heads. X laughs continuously. X cannot stop laughing.
Act IV: Family, dressed in black, sits down to dinner. Sings happy birthday to the tune of “Let Me Call You Sweetheart.” Iris centerpiece sways. X inhales for seventeen candles. X blows all the water glasses over.
Act V: Exit family. Taper candles perform the dance of seven veils. (Mandolins fade.) X uses her hands to gut the cake.
Painted Dolls of Martinique
Island girls have their mouths sewn shut early. It is not pleasant
to be able to speak. So the lead stitch is cast. So a knot begets the garland. By the time
we are twelve our first mouths are sealed
white. We replace them with wax lips [End Page 505]
from the drug store, we paint
our eye flowers, we learn other mouths.
Letters from Madinina
stra ‘ ta n. pl. of STRATUM and then the clouds come
I hang a hammock from bamboo stalks that crack like line breaks, and curl in the comma’s nook.
Dream the first T is a palm r leans against
rubs up and down like a sun bear on the pineappled trunk working an itch between the cuff of shoulder blades.
a’s become artichokes r scoops and juggles.
Their green rubber petals bloom like fingers’ hands lobbing lime colored fists.
The pencil snaps (snap n. 1. a sound of pencils [one of five] 2. a species of cookie 3. the song of cane) clouds gone.
Tomorrow: I’ll find an eyelash (like a scythe) has closed the parentheses and cradles the postscript.
Address to the War Council
We’re all fools stumbling around in hospital gowns. Grasping at ties. Looking for walls to press up against. Fearing those doctors, real or imagined, always behind us, shaking their heads. Sadly, there is no cure for this.
Or perhaps, we’re the doctors, gasping at our own heads, pressing ourselves into cures, and our gowns, lost, stumble around in search of patients.
No, here it is. The ghost of some cure ties us to walls. Shakes a finger at what we doctor. In the background our hospital gowns tremble, fearing us fools. Curiously, this is no imagined sickness. [End Page 506]
Lindsay Walker recently earned her Ph.D. in English at the University of Southern Mississippi and is an instructor of English at Auburn University. Winner of the Center for Writers 2009 Joan Johnson Award for Fiction, she served as poetry editor for the literary journal Juked from 2005 to 2010. Her manuscript, “The Josephine Letters,” was a finalist for the 2009 Walt Whitman Award, and her poetry has appeared recently, or is forthcoming, in West Branch, The Southeast Review, Gulf Stream, The Southern Quarterly, and The Southern Poetry Anthology.
