For the Lost Women in Prisons: A Texas Two-Step
April 18, 2017She’s hay poured On a burning bed She’s an envelope With a love letter missing She’s 4 a.m. She’s amen She’s chewing bone She’s the grease stain On your grease-stained…
She’s hay poured
On a burning bed
She’s an envelope
With a love letter missing
She’s 4 a.m. She’s amen
She’s chewing bone
She’s the grease stain
On your grease-stained apron
She’s forget-me-nots
Forgotten She’s a salt lick
She’s so hot
They fried an egg in her head
She’s a gas can
She’s matches
She’s just-picked
Cherries she’s a gag bit
A snaffle bit
She’s the shuffle
In Texas two-step when he cut in
She’s snake bit a horned sidewinder
She’s an erased route
She’s a garden of mouths
She’s the coastal duck’s
Fine down stuffed
In your pillow She’s an old spice
Grinder She’s what’s tied
To a hitching post She’s Pentecostal
Hymns 4 and 6 She’s the rubbed-out sky
Blue Cadillac Black as the casket
Grilled and married in mockingbird trill
She’s the skinned
Armadillo boots
If you want her
Look for her under your bootsoles
She’s sheared lamb infused
She’s a rancher’s blown glass
She’s refracted She cuts
The moon into a thousand slices
She’s wild asparagus a bait shop She’s spilt milk
She’s refried beans lost wallets red chili socket wrenches
Her name under rocks under roots of river cypress
A child asks, what is the grass?
Across the range She’s the wind
Witch grass love grass wild rye
Your mouth on your lover’s thigh
What has become of the women and children?
She’s a mother’s lost song
She’s the gulf grass you lay down on
She’s a cage of gassed canaries
She’s the honeybee on your grave
—Catherine Bowman (Monroe County)
This poem is from Can I Finish, Please? (Four Way Books, 2016).
Photo by Jackie Gloye
Catherine Bowman is the award-winning author of 1-8OO-HOT-RIBS, Rock Farm, Notarikon, The Plath Cabinet, and most recently Can I Finish, Please? She also edited Word of Mouth: Poems featured on NPR’s All Things Considered. Her poems have appeared in The New Yorker, Ploughshares, The Paris Review, The LA Times and Best American Poetry among other journals. She lives on a farm and teaches literature, writing, and poetry at Indiana University.
Poetry Prompt: Character Sketch through Metaphors
Write a list poem using vivid metaphors to describe a particular group of people that society tends to forget, look down upon or stereotype. Imaginatively enter the sensual world of the group you’re describing. Embrace contradictions and the music of language. Let your ear help guide the imagery.
Indiana Humanities is celebrating National Poetry Month by sharing a poem and prompt every day in April. Indiana Poet Laureate Shari Wagner selected these poems and wrote the prompts.