MORTIFICATION TRIPTYCH

I. MASTER JOHN REED PUNISHES JANE FOR HIDING IN THE CURTAINED WINDOW SEAT AND READING HIS COPY OF BEWICK'S HISTORY OF BRITISH BIRDS

She's nestled by the window. She's light as a celery stick. Nothing between them but this scarlet shroud. She wants to wedge her flesh between the folds when he parts the curtains and snatches the volume. The beloved picture book, its shores of Lapland, Siberia, Spitzbergen, Nova Zembla, Iceland, dangles from his hands like a thirsty meat cleaver. She flies toward the locked door. The text poised in his grubby hand like a hacksaw—teeth glittering like his eyes when he decapitates doves in the yard. His dragon breath hovers above her. Bewick's History soars across the breakfast room, a Chinese star slicing her scalp. Fire spews from his nostrils. She's splayed across the carpet, a bird rending its own plumage. On the back of her neck, blood sizzles; she smears it beneath her eyes like war paint. She flaps her wings in the dragon's face and claws her initials across his arm. Her beak gleams through the smoke. The breakfast room splattered with feathers, scales and ash.

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II. LOCKED IN THE RED ROOM

She crawls beneath the garnet couch, hides like an abandoned rag doll, like the missing clasp on her favorite dress, a base coat of nail polish, a clitoris, lice latched onto a stranger's hair, like a solitary sock, the nipple capped by a child's mouth, a penny, her uncle's letters ripening in a drawer like wild berries, the mattress cowering beneath its Marseilles comforter, like termites crunching the mahogany vanity, sinking their teeth into chairs carved for the benefactress, sawing through the rash between her toes as she rubs her feet across the crimson carpet again and again trying to smother an invisible fire, to stamp out spirits seeping through the barred windows, the brick chimney, the bolted door, dead relatives draining the spark of her thoughts—their fleeting brilliance diving off the lip of this crater, this exile among rosewood jewel caskets, blushing walls, and sanguine shadows.

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III. SENTENCED TO THE STOOL

Treacherous slate, cold slab for math sandpapers her chilblains, slips through her fingers, becomes a soft-bodied lamprey glissading before Brocklehurst's feet, the Holy Moly instructing everyone to blacklist her, to treat her like a Jane Doe, but she's so nervous and pitiful, she pees until her skirt is a wet wash cloth, fears he'll slap her forehead as if banging a jammed cash register, make her kneel on a bed of rice—instead he orders her to the stool where her totem pole body wilts as droopy Lowood girls sitting at their desks upchuck shillings, deposit them up the math tutor's nostrils until she expectorates soda cans for everyone but Jane, who's still on the stool, watching equations writhing on chameleon chalkboards that stampede out the room, while cold air sweeps through the open windows tempting her to scratch her itchy scalp, her alert nipples, her tired ankles staring at the tarnished buckles of her Mary Janes, rows of MJ's nailed to the ceiling, walls, floor, oh she fears those innocent shoes with slick foreheads, hollow necks, and gaping mouths will drown her in their parched throats.

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I read Charlotte Brontë's Jane Eyre at sixteen. The novel struck such a deep chord that I wrote a series of poems based on its characters and events. This triptych deals with humiliation, suffering, and confinement. The boxy prose poems serve to reinforce Jane's sense of alienation and entrapment. As with revisionist fairy tales, this triptych appropriates the original text as a springboard and enabled an exploration of fear and mental instability in the face of danger. Parts II and III were an experiment in surrealism.

VINTAGE BERTHA

I. BERTHA VERSUS MASON

—She said she'd drain his heart.

The spiderback chair faces the fireplace.
    Flames unfurl like peacock feathers.
He rubs his arm on the spot where
    his sister's teeth marks are fossilized,
taps his fingers against the shot glass
    between sips of Jamaican rum.
The glare reminds him of her swollen
    eyes gleaming with warped moonlight.
Just before the chandelier crystals crashed
    like cymbals then drooped like wilted chrissies.
Just before she forked her nails into his chest
    as if stabbing a piece of mutton.

II. BERTHA TORCHES THORNFIELD

Eyes closed, head bowed, arms
outstretched to channel the elements,
she sways like an empty hammock,
flickers like the transitory radiance
of daylight about to be snuffed.

She tosses the stolen candle
onto the battlement like a grenade,
like tear gas, like a stick of dynamite.
She leans over the precipice,
hair draping her face,
and whispers a brief prayer,
the only words capable of pulsing
past her parched lips: Coulibri, bamboo,
frangipanni, vetiver, sangoree.

Flames like Spanish Town sunsets,
tongues of fire cascading
from the roof like ripcords
can't save her, as she dives,
a crazed pterodactyl.

III. ODE TO BERTHA ANTOINETTE MASON

Your mandarin voice resonates
among the chinoserie escritoire,
the spiced meat stew, silver toothpicks,
spikes of spun sugar, bedizened scarecrows
and giggling fountains in shaggy gardens,
in the phosphorescent silence of mausoleums,
in their cavalcade of corpses: shepherd
boys, gypsy lads, chignoned priests,
lovely cartomancers with waxen fingers,
their whorled prints frozen on La Papesse,
La Morte, La Tour Abolie.
O moonless voracious huntress,
O moth-ravaged mistress,
men want to kiss the wormy oak of your harpsichord mouth
as mauvish evening sheds its submarine radiance.

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Originally conceived as three separate pieces, I placed these poems side-by-side and felt they worked stronger as part of a larger whole. Though these shorter pieces are not sonnets, I was searching for the same type of compression often found in sonnets. Unlike some of the more "modernized" Jane and Bertha poems I've written, I wanted these to be infused with a sense of Gothic mystery.