poems: Bianca Spriggs

OMEN

And then there was the time we found a sorry gray cat
that had been hit outside ______’s house right down the street
from the cafe. The animal was so pitiful, our bleeding hearts
couldn’t stand to leave it, so we found many newspapers,
our hands never once touching any parasites, to maneuver it
off the pavement and the threat of more mangling tires.
The flies hadn’t gotten to be very thick yet, and we conveyed
the cat over to the grass, it’s peridot eye petrified open.
It lay there on ______’s lawn for three days because we didn’t know
what else to do. Later, when we confessed we’d chosen
his house to place the cat until we could find someone to bury it,
he got angry and called us putas; he’d been so concerned
it was one of the lovers he’d wronged come to put roots on him.
He would have never suspected his fate would turn sour
from the hands of friends. Henceforth, all the bad luck
that barreled like thunderheads in a summer storm towards him,
he blamed on us and our dead cat. Even after we all moved away,
even though we were all very congenial, ______’s troubles
stuck to him like dried blood on the sagging outer gums
of a dead mouth.

WATERBODY

I was born underwater—Erykah Badu, On and On
I think I’d like a mermaid to love—Charles Bukowski, I want a mermaid

1.
You don’t see them
even in the wild that often anymore.
She is far from home, I can tell—
her hair is a mess, gums bleeding;
she says she’s been living off
of the soybean oil they soak sardines in,
rooting around in dumpsters behind townhomes
with plenty of people who own cats.
Her scales might have been opalescent
once, but have dimmed
and are sloughing off in great strings
from around her fins.
Her skin probably used to be
something like rose gold
but is frayed and faded to rust.
It would be the broken mermaid
that came to me.

2.
She likes to sunbathe on my deck.
She likes for me to fill up the kiddy pool,
set it up in the grass and let her splash around
until the sprinklers come on.
She says even in the ocean
women make compromises.
To her, being with me is like being in the wild.
But for me, she doesn’t mind
letting herself feel a little tame.

3.
On Sunday, her tail splits right down the middle.
I am giving her a bath because she’s got a thing
for bubbles and it justs pull apart
like she’s busted a seam.
We are so surprised, we laugh.
She screeches, startling the cat (who follows her
around like a lost lover, licking at her fins and scales
while we watch TV).
She kicks her new legs and the scales fly
away from her like coins.
I tell her not to pick at what she has left—
her skin, so pink and new,
is as glossy as the inside of a carp’s mouth.
Her arms find their way around my neck
because I’ve shown her how to embrace
when we are pleased or frightened
and we stay like this, sobbing,
until the water turns to salt.

4.
I keep my hair down so she cannot see
the gills that gape in my neck.
I wear socks so she does not see the webbing
that has grown between my toes.
I am cold all of the time and spend most
of the day sunbathing on the deck.
We try to keep her fins when they fall off
to make room for her feet.
We hang them to dry like they are roses
but while we are making dinner,
the cat climbs the curtains to rip them down.
She asks me to cut her hair.
She has no more use for locks studded with pearls and shells.
Tonight, while she is asleep, I fill the kiddy pool
beneath a full moon and take off all of my clothes
because they only irritate what is budding underneath.

5.
She knows.
She caught me with my head
in the aquarium for a breath of fresh air.

6.
She insists on taking me herself.
My tail has grown too large to fit comfortably
in the bathtub, and the sardines just taste like road-kill.
The scales itch and my dying skin stinks.
I trail fluid everywhere and it’s difficult
to get used to new organs and orifices.
I am becoming a nuisance, I can tell,
so I make it easy for her.
I tell her I want to go.
So, we make ready.
She takes apart the cowry necklaces
we bought from the street festival and weaves
the shells into my hair.
She pours sea salt into warm bathwater
and scrubs until my skin is bright as rose gold.

7.
Even when light barely pierces a surface,
when it splinters through the flotsam,
spindling into as many rapid points as a night sky,
a body will find what it needs to make itself at home.

8.
I am a frozen ocean, thawing,
tectonic plateaus of ice breaking
at the seams before an engorged sun.

Spools of kelp unravel—
they are my hair.

I am an ocean remembering
she is an ocean.

BIANCA SPRIGGS, is an Affrilachian Poet and Cave Canem Fellow. She holds degrees from Transylvania University and the University of Wisconsin. She is a Kentucky Humanities Council Lecturer and the creator and programmer of the Gypsy Poetry Slam featured annually at the Kentucky Women Writers Conference. Pushcart Prize winner and National Book Award Finalist, Bianca’s poems reflect the trials and triumphs of growing up as a woman of color in a border state. Bianca Spriggs is the author of Kaffir Lily (Wind Publications) and her work may also be found in the anthologies, New Growth: Recent Kentucky Writings, America! What’s My Name? and the journals, Caduceus, Alehouse, Torch, and the Appalachian Heritage Magazine.