National Poetry Month

Apotropaic Magic by Margaret Wack

I am the king's daughter slaughtered.

I am a thrall, enthralled, I charm the ocean

into calmness and surcease. I am

a witchwood, hazel woman

smooth as flesh, woven and crafted

and cast from the cliff.

I am a carven queen, a saint,

a pretty thing to bless the ship

with good luck and swift passage.

What do you hope to turn away?

You know that blood must bless the sea,

you people of the shores and crags

and salt-strewn settlements forget slowly:

the ceremony stands: I go before you as a sacrifice

and sink through brine and black water

and plant my feet upon a field

of blue-faced girls who bloom and snarl:

we are your legacy, your lineage, your litany,

the faces that will eat you when you drown.

National Poetry Month

Seeds by M Sereno

They hide the truth in seeds, you see.

In the black jeweled eyes of the atis. In the slippery throngs of pakwan,

in bitter lanzones watered by my tears when my mother told me

of the tree growing in my belly, nourished on my death.

Swallow a seed and it will sprout within you,

becoming your veins, invading your bones.

Those poets and conquerors knew this. Knew the mouth is an altar.

Centuries later their stories sink into our skin, coiling and uncoiling

as we swallow fables, fleshy pulp of perfect red apples,

a rosy roundness we are taught to dream: ruddy lips,

fairest face, beauty enough to kill for. I did not eat fruit as a child.

I ate summer, storm, the star-strung perfume of night,

spitting out the seeds because I wanted to live.

Then I grew. These days it's difficult to remember

the crack of wood between my teeth: their stories say

all fruits are poisoned, and forests are lies. We repose

in dark of skin and shadow. Oh, I have swallowed

so much fruit my cheeks bulge with the fullness of it, oh

my speech has gorged on this glut of strange language

so I can say, snow, apple, pear with glassy clarity

while my tongue twists on kamias, manggang hilaw, durian.

I am afraid of forests. I do not know why

the pineapple has a thousand eyes. I do not eat,

except when it is safe. They hide the truth in seeds,

and princesses asleep in glass and sea and thorn

cannot eat—only wait, while dark around them

the night comes alive with aswang. The ones who eat.

My mother warned me, see, see: eat too much truth

to spite your hunger, and that is what you become—

this snake-haired woman shorn in half

grinning as she stretches her long sucking tongue,

lips red with blood of infants and innocent maidens.

But oh mother, oh fruit: to awaken into the pulse-point of night

and glory in all the sharpnesses of taste, to swallow

all fruit and flesh and seed, to nourish forests in limbs

deep as earth, to feast on storm salty-sweet and star-bursting

with stories unpeeled and still dripping with death and womb:

to starve no longer— Oh storytellers, oh fairest princesses.

Let me take this fruit that has killed you.

It was never truly yours. Let me crack it open

bare-handed and sink my teeth into it, drink deep.

They hide the truth in seeds. Look:

how it runs down my fingers, sweet and clear as death,

bitter as history.