CATE MARVIN

Poem for an Awful Girl


I’ll hand her his heave-ho. I offer her an extra
arm, give her a golden drip of fat to ring itself
round the mantle of her hips, then I’ll trigger
a slight tic that tugs insistent below her lowly
left eye, her moo-cow look, and if I’ve spared
her a spidering of veins along her thick thighs,
 it’s merely because I’m feeling kind. I return to  

needle the canvas I’ve lately been stitching for
a pillow upon which I’ve decided his head will
eventually lie. I’ve been stitching her for a long
time outside this room as I’ve been imagining
her tossing her sneer off from behind, she who
 considers herself the candelabra losing its fuse
to every darkening room she’s leaving behind.  

(And, yes, it’s with a gasp that I consider how
she cannot know this yet, how this knowledge
shall some day soon unbecome her face as does
a most unwelcome announcement, such as that
regarding an imminent flood made to a town’s
mayor, but I am getting ahead of myself here,
because there is in fact no reason she should  

care, and this is likely the gist of it: I’m not even
a shadow in the corner of her room.) I am now
stitching in a room belonging to any other house
owned by any other landlord who owns any other
house she is presently residing in. I could sit here
all afternoon, scratch my crotch while plotting her
death, and no one would care; worse, not even her.  

Were it not for such precarious boredoms, their
weighty responsibilities, the pastime of needlecraft
would not have been invented for women to push
their disenchantments through a painted canvas
with thickest needle. Late into the night, stitching
deep. If I had an extra arm, I’d move faster on this
project, I lament. My pillow shall a flower depict.

  
149 The Paris-American

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Cate Marvin is the author of World's Tallest Disaster (2001) and Fragment of the Head of a Queen (2007), both published by Sarabande Books. Her third book of poems, Oracle, is forthcoming from Norton in March 2015. She is Professor of English at the College of Staten Island, City University of New York, and Co-Founder of VIDA: Women in Literary Arts (www.vidaweb.org).
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