Rachel Lockwood
Ignata
a term used sometimes in classical studies to denote a female family member with an unrecorded name
A step towards an origin point is a downward movement.
A slow descent into primordial lake, toward the place
where the grave marker reads Ignata,
the parish record tells us how many sons she had.
That may be all.
Counting degrees of matrilineal line,
over and over closer to nothing
and silence.
Not even a whimper, not even a space where nothing happened.
Just a place where nothing ate itself into confirmation,
I said to a girl I hate, I feel like he’s missing the point.
Her stare sharp, like births, deaths, & marriages,
like naming all your daughters Clodia.
My name is written nowhere so hard
they came up with a name for it.
I wind myself into a coil that blocks the throat.
I wind tighter and tighter until I contain all mass and energy.
Science will call me a hole.
Cottonwood
A girlfriend is mistakenly advertised as a zombie movie,
turns out to be a Western where she builds you
a house at the bend of the river, Joan Didion style.
Songs echo, a slow blinking eye. We gaze at the kinds of lights
from tv shows where doctors have sex with each other.
A girlfriend is a foreign soap opera, practical as a
star-shaped cookie cutter, subtitled forever, makes me dream
saying biz yersiniz with a perfect accent.
I tried to make a name for myself, bolted upright
like Frankenstein, switched the film over,
flew on bat wings, my pulse asleep in its bag.
She will learn the cardiovascular language,
know every acronym. A girlfriend drags around
a heart that refuses to stop. A girlfriend takes a pulse with her thumb.
A girlfriend is risen from sleep.
Rachel Lockwood is a Hawkes Bay gal living and studying in Te Whanganui-a-Tara. She has been published in Starling, Salient, NZ Poetry Shelf, Milly Magazine, Stasis and Sour Cherry.