It's #tbt! Enjoy this great one from SWWIM Every Day's archives!
She’s a grinder, a hill of black pepper, a deadly spice, no shrubbery in sight. So my father and mother after the flood climbed to bed to try for me once more. We can’t think about the morning screwing, the noon screwing, the evening screwing, then the piggy baby pooping and peeing, or the mountain of ground black pepper on my mother’s mashed potatoes and my father’s bacon sandwiches. Then years of screwing the children, not screwing like sex, but screwing out of, not unscrewing the turn of the screw, but the deeper screwing of the lid on the jar, shouted damns in the hallway, damn it, screwing out of the ordinary nursery, the grinding of toys and dolls into rubble. Look, you, at the sequence of lessons, corrupted flesh and spirit, how screwing is grinding, how little the children knew.
Mary Meriam co-founded Headmistress Press and edits the Lavender Review: Lesbian Poetry and Art. She is the author of My Girl’s Green Jacket (2018) and The Lillian Trilogy (2015), both from Headmistress Press. Her poems appear recently in Poetry, Prelude, Subtropics, and The Poetry Review. Her new collection, Pools of June, is due out from Exot Books on 2/2/22.
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