Note: The first of the three poems below is a continuation of the above excerpt from Zenith — written in the voice of Mina, Coco’s mother and a Romani poet, “Mina the Lotus” is from Zenith‘s book-within-a-book, titled Eating the Midnight Lotus.
Mina the Lotus
A conversation between Mina and Sati Sara, the Romani Goddess of Fate, Time, and Chaos
If, like you say, I am rooted in you
as a lotus is rooted in water,
then where are you, Dark One?
I don’t ask that you tell me
but nothing could live without water this long—
The problem with you, Goddess, is you
only know spirits and mine’s inside a body,
so when you say all of this is an illusion
you speak to my ransacked shell, cracked open
where it matters, so your words trickle out.
I live in Paris, not the Ganges.
Your blood is not the Seine.
I cannot rinse my flesh away
like clay. The virgin
will never rise, cold-petaled, above the fray.
The town I sprung from thinks I’m loose
as sin, but I’m faithful
to your black-mud skin.
Fate must have wanted me damaged
so I don’t know who to blame—
you for forgetting me? Or him for breaking in?
Last night, you brought me to the Jardin du Luxembourg
and golden-black ecstasy from root to crown.
Every fish spouted my blood, red running freely,
drowning in Medici’s lovely insult to the city.
You said, “An arrow only has one target.”
I suppose yours couldn’t find me.
Black Madonna, I hated your power
as a girl because it was the only story I believed in.
The Keeper of Fate; the Keeper of rape.
I didn’t understand that time
is chaos, that time is your crown,
and the red thread noose of birth
and death had severed in your teeth
at the belch of the void.
In my dreams, I wash your feet in Leda’s Hidden Fountain
and make an elixir from your bathwater,
drink it, and die to be inside
you, genatrix of the three worlds,
pour myself out your mouth
where Polyphemus surprises Acis and Galatea.
Then I pray for your strange tongue
to slither out and drink, just to know
you lapping at my root.
Terrible Mother, you let him tear my insides
out the root, even though I prayed
for you to save me or strike me dead
and you did neither:
he split me and my soul rotted out.
It’s how I know you’re not my mother.
After the raping years, my village sent a viper to me:
I wore her poison like a necklace in my attic apartment.
I let her hang from my earlobe by her fangs
and called her pretty
as we looked out the window onto Montmartre.
She took off her skin, all her idea,
to banish the bad blood
and make up for what was done,
even after she sat, airing her fangs
in her basket, waiting for my hand
to drop. That’s when she scented a sister
—both bait in a world that lets that happen.
Now every blood-wet petal
is a scale; my root, a writhing tail.
Even vipers oblige me.
I stripped-off shame and family custom
to be with you. My skin came off next.
I stretched my leather, pegged it
to the earth by four points of desire.
I don’t ask to regrow. Unpetaled,
I am raw in the finery of pain,
pacing naked in the catacombs, parceling
my ego like mala beads, counting
108 heads in your garland
looping like the alphabet around your neck,
looking them straight and naming them one by one
so when you come, you’ll eat them instead of me,
my darkness, my love.
But it’s morning
and there are crows above my bed—
your initials.
When I love you,
I love even the monster of you
and I don’t need to understand.
I count the feathers your crows drop
on the hardwood floor and interpret the sum,
infinitely reading the filigree across my palms
and screaming meaning into it, into your mess, because the universe was made from sound, goddammit, and I will break it
and know it from sound.
I give the feathers water in a bowl.
And it’s true that I’ve given you everything
I have and might have some day. Neither
of us are meant for daylight, but I am
meant for possession. You are meant
for dancing heads off of demons underfoot,
for devouring your worshipers or the egos they offer you,
for abandoning your charges in the name of Fate or Chaos
and refusing to name which.
You let him
empty me
and I haven’t forgotten.
Come into me, let me drink
your water through my root!
Make it up to me—you should
know that’s how love works.
All I have left are 108 crow feathers, one sister viper,
and two fangs in my demon-eater heart.
You’re not the only one with secrets.
I only ask that you love me as I love you.
First Exorcism
When the demon is slain and blood spits to the soil birthing new demons, one for each drop, then I’ll light candles. When the veil falls over my mother’s eyes and she becomes so many unreachable women, one for each silk thread, then I’ll try not to search for her. We are Roma, Gypsies, so when she is diagnosed with Dissociative Identity Disorder and refuses the hospital, we throw a healing ceremony. I don’t tell her it’s an exorcism. Why frighten her? When it’s over, I won’t remember her screaming, “You were raped because you’re a whore.” I won’t remember that her white father pimped her through kindergarten. I’ll only remember that she gave me dimes for each pinecone I collected, that she held me even in madness, that the pine boughs shivered their glass-like blood when touched, and that each mother-self sprang up from the sword.
The Gargoyle Back Scratcher
The woman with calcifying organs is my mother. She scrapes the gargoyle back scratcher along her hard back, again and again, even though it bleeds in places where the skin gives up and cracks. “We used to have wings,” she says, wincing. “We used to have gills.” But her body grows neither. The skin is the largest organ, so her body grows armor, inside and out, so strong it will crumble her with brittle resolve. And what will fall out? Her pearl handgun that we had to hide, her dead father’s collection of child porn, my baby teeth she tried to throw away. She likes the gargoyle’s bulldog face pressing into her palm. She likes when I tell her how gargoyles scare demons away, even though she knows it many times over. She’s had two exorcisms now, but we don’t like to talk about that. She talks to spirits, but I don’t argue because they say nice things. She talks to the Romani Gypsy ancestors from her mother’s side—they say they’re proud that I keep the family trades alive, that I’m a good dancer, and I should keep telling fortunes, even though I could be a professor now if I really worked at it. My mother likes to see me as a new version of an old part of us. She likes to see me as the composite sum of parts of herself that she wished for but could never have. She likes to remember that I collected gargoyles as a child because I was afraid of dolls—she neglects that it’s because they stay still, hard, and silent just like I did beneath my cousins and uncles. They stay dead with eyes wide open, just like she did beneath her father. This our destiny, or chaos, depending on Fate’s humor, she told me. My mother comes at you all at once with darkness: how quickly she’s hardening; how brutally she’s dying; how much she loves me; how many suicides she’s attempted; how little I’ve suffered in comparison; how there is nowhere to go to escape the brain, the hardening, the blood but to crack open into the arms of Death, and Death is the beautiful woman for Roma. She will line her skin with gargoyles and say, “We used to have wings, beauty. We used to have gills.”
Jessica Reidy is a writer of part-Romani (Gypsy) heritage from New Hampshire. She earned her MFA in Fiction at Florida State University and a B.A. from Hollins University. Her work has been nominated for a Pushcart, and has appeared in Narrative Magazine as Short Story of the Week, The Los Angeles Review, Arsenic Lobster, and other journals. She’s a staff-writer and Outreach Editor for for Quail Bell Magazine, Managing Editor for VIDA: Women in the Literary Arts, and Art Editor for The Southeast Review. She also teaches creative writing, yoga, and sometimes dance. Jessica is currently working on her first novel set in post-WWII Paris about a half-Romani burlesque dancer and fortune teller of Zenith Circus, who becomes a Nazi hunter.
