It’s impolite I know … to accuse Despite formalities when years hence Your savagery remained a chapter stuck In my throat, wild thorns, without succor. We danced in broken tread, my composition And womanhood, cut into paper girls each Missing a part; arm, chest, hand, kidney Smothered by the need in you to destroy Bluntly like butter knife, unable to cut clean through. My severed head lolled on my flayed neck Dissected lungs breathed glass as gored heart Dried on sharp pike, where among the dying at the battlefield You plunged its metal deep into rigur soil and stood back To admire your awful coup. I am older now, my fingers ache when the weather turns The scars you bequeathed sit like dried flowers on my breast I can’t smell your brand of cigarettes without lurching Toward a bathroom, these little green drinks of memory Invisible to most, staying as memory is wont Even when we seek to sieve it from the river And let others make gold temples. You wouldn’t seek me now, years have seen to that The proclivity you had, was to chew on youth like a wolf Espie a young fawn and lope silent through trees Finding method in murder. I am safe by default, and that burns in my stomach With a molten rage For men like you who disturb innocence Who live on without apology or shame Just the feral stink of a twisted brand of desire One I know the name of too well Are flagrant in your joy to mistreat with impunity. If we met on a street, you’d no more know me Than a stranger, and I would recognize you immediately As holding heavy sword in two hands, muscles trembling I’d scythe you into fragments taken by the wind. You see, I rebuke that we are hunter or hunted It seems to me; one leads into the other And you’ve had your turn at the chase.
Photo by Taylor Heery on Unsplash
Born in Europe, Candice Louisa Daquin is of Sephardi French/ Egyptian descent. Daquin was the Publishing Director at the U.S. Embassy (London) before becoming a Psychotherapist. Daquin is Senior Editor at Indie Blu(e) Publishing, a feminist micro-press and Editorial Partner with Raw Earth Ink. She’s also Writer-in-Residence for Borderless Journal, Editor of Poetry & Art for The Pine Cone Review and Poetry Editor for Parcham Literary Magazine. Daquin’s own poetic work takes its form from the confessional women poets of the 20th century as well as queer authors writing from the 1950’s onward. Her career(s) teaching critical thinking and practicing as a psychotherapist have heavily influenced her writing. As a queer woman of mixed ethnicity and passionate feminist beliefs concerning equality, Daquin’s poetry is her body of evidence.
Read more at The Feathered Sleep.
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