I heard they were calling for poetry at the edge of the world but I knew they did not want my verses full of the songs of women. They had banned high voices years ago and chose to start every argument in an empty room. This required artistry from people better known as piss artists and so they promised to rely on the grass to remember the songs when the people rebelled. Really, they just wanted it to cover all the spoilt places
I sit in the weeds—waiting. Studying the ladder of my thumb I mourn my dragon mother. I whisper an elegy to the wind about how she puffed silk cut smoke from her nose. When I was little she wrapped me in ancient threads, spinning each pattern into a song of women’s endurance, loss, and birthing. I would watch the glowing tip of her cigarette, a monster’s eye, pulsing in the darkly tent—my weird nightlight. We lived in the high chinks of the Kush alongside the tarnished Stone Loaches, their spotty silver backs mirrored in the jewelry dangling from my mother’s neck and doughy lobes. It took slow seasons for us to hear the inching sound of metal screaking all around us. My mother begging the fish to save my voice, to hide me with the mudlarks but they were always bony specimens and liked to drive a hard bargain. My mother had to barter her iridescent scales to cover their spindly bodies before they would hold me in their mouths and swim away with me. She had been left naked and bitter but her last kindness to me was to smother my father and brothers. She could not bear to see them turn to dust so, she shaped them into icy lapis lazuli.
I am the keeper of our songs and when I raise my voice I smash things. Around my neck, I have hung a locket of bright blue so it will be close to my throat as I sing. Listen in the dawn and you will hear the gentle noise of women and know that this is what you once called feeling.
Adele Evershed is an early years educator. She is originally from Wales and has lived in Hong Kong and Singapore before settling in Connecticut. She writes poetry and prose in a room overlooking a wood.