The Setting Sun
You offered me Africa
Made of biscuits
Pomegranate and lemon
I broke off a brittle piece—maybe Somalia
Who knows?
It fizzed on my tongue—
Like so many bitter memories of myrrh
You offered me India
In a cracked bone teacup
Steaming and green,
Unstewed like a Lady in Grey
Who summered in Shimla
Dining with a Maharaja on a Saturday
And beating her servant girl on a Sunday
You offered me Jamaica
Bawdy yet triple refined
To remove all the brown
And sweetly saying
Small up yuhself
While cutting it’s eyes
And leaving duppies in the dregs
You offered me Malaysia
The trees gently scarred
And listing
Like the rubber planters
In the Long Bar
Crunching on peanuts
And bouncing shells on the floor
Little explosions for others to clean up
And then you asked me
What I offered you
Even though we both knew
It would be easier to list the things
I took and would not give back
So I offered you a setting sun
Saying things disappear at night
Yet always knowing it would never be enough
Self Portrait with Joy
At the beginning of the workshop / a young woman reads someone else’s words on aging / and he says / I love that you let yourself laugh / and I think / yes of course you do / we who know / know / we
can’t let ourselves laugh or cough / without tensing our only supple muscles / to stop the leaking
Then he reads his own work / a long list of images / which he calls poetry / and I think / no it’s just an excuse / to air your sex life in public / as he pronounces / pickled / and gluttony / and fritillary / words with lots of tongue / as if he is showing us women all the things / we didn’t realize were there
But we have always lived in a world / where they find more and more ways / to erase a woman / size
zero dresses / or rating our hotness in chili peppers / like we are menu items / making us believe / we should burn our wrinkles / rather than our bras / their economy of beauty / only wanting to keeps us poor and invisible
Then he talks about the importance of endings / and I think / no shit Sherlock / but I smile like
peroxide / and wonder / what do you end on / or do you even get to the end / and what would that feel like coming out of your mouth / a waddle that thinks it’s a swagger / just like him?
I study the handout / his photo as big as a vulture / all about finding joy and stolen delight / and I think
I might write a metaphor / that death is gone / but then on an impulse / I take my pen / and poke out his eyes instead / and I realize / he is right / in the end / it is the little things that bring me joy
The Defenestration Of The Right Sort Of Woman
Of course it would be a chattering man that said my heart would hurt / yet He knew I had the height / and there were always marks to be had for dignity / but then Gabriel / nice in profile because of his wingspan / found out I was not the right sort of woman / so He found another / as easily as picking an unbruised apple before the fall / sealing her curves into a beautiful closing / and turning her into a
lovely sphere / bellied out a bit / white lead on her face / under painting the background / to lift her smiling from the canvas / the only mystery why she agreed
And as for me / I thought what a lucky escape / but of course they had other ideas / always keen on labor / they labored their point / they valued virgins / and only a certain type of woman was worthy of motherhood / until / with their popularity waning / they tried to quilt the light with my bones / insisting they had reformed me / and never realizing / when you cut a design / it’s always what you leave
behind that’s important / so I left my name on their lips / and refused a hand built deaths by stained glass / so they hung me out to dry like a new moon / or the oldest question / just so you could all weep more gracefully
Counter Plot
I dream about Darlicks—just like when I was little
(Is that how you spell it? It seems unlikely—a mishmash of darling and licking)
I’d hide behind the settee
And peek at Dr. Who
A black and white hero
To woo wooh me in my moon waking hours
Giving me night sweats and time traveling explosions
One night—sure my parents were exterminated
I knew the only way to survive was to play dead
I ran into our box room
And draped myself over an open trunk
The metal latch like a gun in my back
Or the fastening of a bra
And I waited….wild on the inside
Dad found me and took me back to the safety of my sheets
And my sleepwalking entered our family folktales
Told and told again like Sunday school parables
Of Dad escaping the pit and his once coal black hair
Of Mam’s martyrdom, destined to bake endless Welsh cakes
That nobody ever ate
And of my brother who kept sticks and stones
In his pockets like treasure
I wonder if I dream about those fancy washing machine villains now
With their buttons and gleam
Because there was never any blood or mourning
Just like in my new space—this final frontier
(although there are plenty of night sweats and the odd explosion)
I Google the name
And find it came from the spine of a book
A book of wonders—The Encyclopedia Britannica
The writers (men of course) used the scrapings—the dal–lek
But they never peeled back the covers
To find the wild inside
And I find I am more disappointed by this than almost anything else I know
V for Victory
From my window
I get a sense of chimneys
Buildings like cake crumbs
A blue corner of sky
Or maybe a trick of the weather
That unlocks a door in me
On the verge of abstraction
I try to turn my eyes brown
Because water is not just one color
And you never know
What happens in a covered gondola
Until it’s too late
After I dragged
All the white of my palette
Into the unjoyful mess
My fingers in the paint
Coming away smelling of geraniums
And laden with traps
Once at the shrine of Mary Magdalene
A priest contemplated my bare legs
I flicked him the vees
And it felt like a victory
I find myself
Thinking about that all the time
Adele Evershed was born in Wales and has lived in Hong Kong and Singapore before settling in Connecticut. Her prose and poetry have been published in over a hundred journals and anthologies such as Every Day Fiction, Grey Sparrow Journal, High Shelf, Tofu Ink Arts Press, Shot Glass Journal, and Hole in the Head Review. Adele has recently been nominated for the Pushcart Prize and Best of the Net for poetry, the Staunch Prize for flash fiction, and her first poetry chapbook, Turbulence in Small Places will be published next year by Finishing Line Press.