Don’t open the cabinets.

Don’t look under the bed.

There is no past, no future.

The children will wither like rosebuds, slough off their fresh-pale beauty and
frustrated growth and slump down with a malodorous sigh.

Don’t kiss me gently on my neck when I am lying on my side in bed,
tears silently streaming down the side of my face and soaking into my
hair and pillow. I couldn’t stand it.

I hate
to be humiliated.

The wolves are coming. I can hear them howling through the walls,
through the sound of the dead leaves as winter closes in. They come
with their bright eyes and their shining coats and gently lick me, lick me
all over…

They are beguiling, those wolves. But don’t believe them. I don’t lie.
I am the tongueless woman.

I am the thousand flakes that shimmer when the sky decides to come down.

Darling, you could not dare to imitate me.

It would be –
What do they call that thing? –
blasphemy.

Don’t sweep too closely under the oven.

There is a little girl who lives under there, and her eyes, red as
blood, peer out from under, her face charred and her heart restless.

Your love is a shape with no name. No words, and no hair.

My dear husband, Tom, Dick, Harry, and Merv, don’t look into the chest of
drawers. Row on top of row, they open up to release unutterable
horrors. They reveal soiled undergarments, bloody pearls, decayed
roses, abortive fictions, and tears.

Please don’t open the closet door.

Don’t look inside the kitchen cabinets; my little girl lives in there
still, has never lived anywhere else, indeed, with her head in her
hands and flashing eyes and soiled black hair and fingers addicted to
kill.

I play music to her. I play Mozart, Bach’s cello suites, Cocteau Twins, whatever is my heart’s desire. I read books to her, every moment I get. I read, oh, Grimm, Hans Christian Andersen, The Secret Garden, Charlotte Bronte. I rub weedy flowers freshly plucked from the field with my impatient fingers against my belly for good luck, and through the nights I sew into my skin a pink ribbon; sometimes weeping, in turns softly and hoarse with blood and violence, with fear of what the future will bring, and the unimaginable beauty, and how I have damned myself with this eternal baggage, made myself heavy with ballast, transfixed myself to the ground with stone stakes. She has infected my whole being, she is a ribbon that has been sewn in and skin has grown over it.

II.

Sometimes I fear that she will rip out of me, penetrating quite easily outwards from the ragged hole in my abdomen like the multiplying branches of a black tree, sliding-slithering-writhing. That she will burst me like ripe fruit splits its sore, bruised skin. Her smile, the silver crescent in a velvet night sky, little sliver of cunning and delicious malice. Will she attach her chubby little cherub arms to me like so many tentacles, with the precious grasp of her forefinger and thumb retain me to her like metal pincers? Will she make me carry her swaddled bundle like a bomb, a tiny sweet nuclear bomb, you dare not let touch the ground? Bearing me onwards to death and dismal oblivion, riding me from hospital bed to graven stone like a black devil with shiny eyes and small hands, small feet.

I am a temple for this creature. My body is her house, she will litter and soil it with light ease. I array myself in shawls of soft wool when I sit outside on the stoop, regalia of loose clothes and elasticated waistbands, good to house a god, tiny eyeless god whose head points south and feet point northwest. She plays the inside of my ribs like a xylophone, kicks them in when I am bad, grinds my spleen when she is sick with ennui. She crawls up into my ribcage, hyacinths and rosemary and ivy, belladonna, spilling and overflowing it as blossoms of the bacchanalia, creeping between the spaces, twining around the curved white laths. And palpates my heart by squeezing it with her fist, letting go, then squeezing tight, her freakish elfin game, and then bringing her mouth near it and sucking on its dark juices like pulpy rotten fruit. She makes little black ants to march along my spine, at nights when I can’t sleep with the sensation of her big in my womb, so beyond the disturbing, ticklish sensation of someone else being too near, breathing down one’s back: she occupies the same space as me. Pricks my brain with electric impulses, and sugars my bloodstream with whimsical drips of saliva when she is feeling sweet. I am tight as a drum; she’ll play me till I break.

III.

My liberty will free her from any hell. I will walk her from meridian to meridian, we will spin like crazy stars, we can be as unsanctified as we like, we will laugh in the face of prayers and let our hair stream forth like a terrific torrent. I will give her no parasites she, sighing, reluctantly carries and lets live on her shoulder and in her belly and in the deepest pits of her soul through life, that she half-fondly pets and watches, horrified and amazed, as it engorges its awesomely voracious appetite. As it eats all the joy she shyly gathers and regurgitates its waste. My child will live in the sun, bathe in blood, and partake of the dark, and of the madness of the swollen moon. She will not be a slave, or a cripple who loves its sole thin, anemic beam of light – who am I to know?

Growing heavy in me, I am sore and roundly used; I am more productive than I have ever been. I go through life belly-first, holding its soft, warm weight in my hands and bearing it aloft like precious cargo. I toss my head back on the pillow at night with exhaustion and dissolve like a bag of gems, eyelids flickering like paper scrims over the light of unspeakable ideas and pictures. Mad impulses and thrilling images of beauty and goodness. I speak to her whatever my heart desires, send her warm energy, hoping she must receive somehow, floating out there alone in dark, muffled space, her umbilical cord anchoring her like an astronaut’s tether. Faint, yet deep sounds reverberating underwater, whale-echoes. The fever dances madly every night, from tip to toe of me, the flowers overflow their ribcage cornucopia, she beats her gelatin skull against my thick battened walls to get out. I sing to her, though my voice is weak and bad, and lay us down in fields of strawberry blossoms, with the wind whispering through my thighs and flapping the bloody-hand-printed edge of my gossamer nightgown to and fro.

That six-month lullaby lulled me to sleep. I used my most dulcet tones to coax her out of hiding. But when I woke up, she had gone, nor was she to be found behind the bushes.

IV.

Now I lay in a subway station, on dirty tile slapped by strangers’ feet, my legs splayed obscenely out before me, little rag doll flopped over, my hair strewing across my eyes as I weep, tilting my head back slightly and forwards unstably, drunk on despair. A pool of red staining the dirty tiles and my dress, streaming forth from where the fork branches the road of destiny, two brittle little legs thrown out and a life lost in between. Washing downriver to be, I suppose, swept off with the janitor’s gray sud-water.

I hate you, God. You cheater and stealer, you shamefaced stockbroker. You scream in a wet black cave, you prayer to primordial forces, you destiny plotting to drag me drowning down like a leviathan. You howl from red, wounded places, you snatcher of joy from the overturned cradle, you shattered glass on the floor, you white cards of sympathy staring me down like blank, lidless eyes, you sordid, furtive destroyer, meekly carrying away your claimed prey, crabbing, defecting.

My ribcage lay on the forest floor for days, claimed by the insidious undergrowth, my hair was strewn over my face, and I looked vacantly (because I was vacated) heavenwards and my fist was palsied at my side as the insects and sweet little dark creatures came out to pick my bones. My child’s father stopped by, knelt, and offered me a single lily, placing it with conscientious care in my slightly parted mouth, petals opening outwards in a circle, as the sole companion to my twin orbs staring blankly, fixed, fascinated, forever overhead.