I am a woman; I am a mountain,
I hover over you, a thumb laid
hard across the thickest vein that pulses
fuel down your neck. I’ve locked my knees
beneath oceans, and for nine hours
at a time, I’ve rocked back on your sex,
your hips; I’ve bitten clean through your lip,
and chained you to this chalky wall as skull
and a prick, but you keep on fashioning
this cell for yourself: roof and rib, roof
and rib. And while I clutch your neck
between my tall black boots, blindfolded
and dumbfounded, you’ve the nerve to shine
a lamp in my face and call me mine.
But I’m that peak that does beguile, full
of a darkness that begets your fire
And deep in my womb, where you do sin,
I moan as that little canary
sings. I tell you now I will let blood
flow like water and thicken as mud,
carrying your body off without
guilt, deep in the hole in me you have
built–filling the fissure, fossilized
in lode, petrified, crushed to coal.
Mine
Andrea Null Click to read more...
Andrea Null, a West Virginia Native, recently graduated from Washington and Lee University, where she received George A. Mahan Awards for both her poetry and fiction, the Elizabeth B. Garrett Prize in English and a Robert E. Lee Research Scholarship for Political Philosophy. She teaches English at a north Georgia boarding school and waitresses in West Virginia in the summertime. These poems, along with work in the fall Oxford American, are her first publications. Andrea would like to dedicate these works to the memory of her late mentor, Irene McKinney.
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