Daughters of Abel
They say that sacred wood pierces the moribund flesh, that the resin would crown your legs before your palms. And though fleeing is the one way of egress, it is commenced only by your lowest crus. Vanquishers of steeples were masters of the thread of the hands, so when the spire ensued, their movements were cornered by medieval piety.
And your fountain of enunciated literature deems you a chronicled wishing well, your arrowed force driven to the province reimburses the captive indigo back to the sky. Its cerulean as pale as winter steam, as Potemkin as this village. The claims that this tongue is culpable whilst you, yourself, are chaste were never enough to claim you a cherubic vessel.
What is man if not a uniform trial of annexation? His cord plays with the barriers of language, resonant enough for the rest of the world to clatter below his edges. I have never referred to the collective consciousness as the supposed caliber the word ‘man’ holds, nor do I accost the tones of this connotation.
And I am every woman except the ones entangled in the wires of a blue display. Their femininity is sought-after and weaponized, their rage rhapsodized with glamour. Their wrists and the kneading of the metallic boulder have become as familiars are to witches. For man presumes the woman as the torching case and himself as the arsonist.
And I bear not the sight of the caravan the ancient women were prostrated in, their boroughs cleansed by kerosene and their children forsaken. Must we escort Helen to her land of abduction? Why do the masses elegize her with Troy, the skulk shackle of venery, when she had a Spartan childhood?
The idea, the outline of a halo, the gates of a patio, the repulsion that comes with reverence all entreat the works of an acerbic raconteur, whose sibilance recrudesces. When the woman occludes the viaduct to motherhood, the aura surrounding her trance leans to a conscious realm of revolt.
And every woman suffers from an anchor molded from osmium, one that is inscribed on their black ship of sorrow. And as it beholds all the grief in the world, spleen recruits itself. The flukes of each side point at the same woman, one at her dome and the other at her tongue.
But didn’t you aver that as long as the tongue dwells on anarchy, the head is to be dispensed?
And the state of current art needs not my gendered confederacy. I strike for character; I need not historicize demotion. And we undulate with locution as if we were ever the mistresses of ceremonies, but we are merely damsels with a preconceived tune, and as the ballroom meets its autumn, we transform into banquets.
For I hear the contempt with each uttered profanity, why must the altar of Aphrodite be mentioned, unearthed before the flickering lantern? Why must a woman’s body be named as a vituperative malediction? Why would the nether lip be claimed by armors of self-proclaimed activity?
The spume once kissed the ripened age of my diary, and afterwards, the bleeding torrent awoke the inimical walls of sloughing. A paladin inked me the alleyway where they later on found me; a stillborn maiden withered by the abject touch of mirth.
And beneath the light of a damp dawn, this cremation set this tower ablaze. If I were a passive passenger, I would elude this landscape. But suppression is a false deity, and I am not one with supplication.
This Hellenic tragedy turns theatrical, and the stage a clan of mercenaries. The streets born of carrion, the tales of crud. An enveloped cushion influences my saturated senses in relation to the avaricious bounds of man, but the whispers of the lancet window redress my roofless tongue. My exclaims reach the angel waterfalls for these rectifications can never be but a hostile entity to me. We have attributed a masquerade of pretenses when it comes to man, that he is a default greatness and anything of short means he is simply still a lad.
The first murderer did not learn from a woman, he was just a man.
My sepulture shalt be engraved with the names of lapsed women and their dispossessions. The women of wombs, the women of bloodshed, the women fallen victims to language and nobility. The stolen sisterhoods, the bent daggers, the colonized lands, the lost pearls, the dissolved sororities, the altered winter of innocence. Mary’s age of betrothal. Mary’s too youthful conception.
Even this title is flawed, and I made sure of it, for it is true what is stated of our callow deaths. We are all slain daughters, the same way Abel departed. Yet, what pains more than death is the ocean washing away the blood without a eulogy, just like how it treated Aclima.
