Madwoman

Shara McCallum

• Publisher: Alice James Books
• Year: 2017
• Print ISBN: 9781938584282
• eBook ISBN: 9781938584411
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Poetry
• Index: Literature

Haunting, alarming, transformative, and elusive, these poems bridge together the gaps between development stages: from girl, to woman, and then mother. With the complexities that intertwine them, can you be all three at once? Who shapes our identity, and who is in control here? How do we recognize, acknowledge, and honor the changing of who we are?

Madwoman Apocrypha

When comes the night that made you?

In this field: snow not yet underfoot,

trees whose branches are shorn of leaves,

this sky a grey slate over and around

houses echoing the shape of the river,

Q: What created you?

A: A breach in the self.

they descend—

a swirl of smoke,

reassembling on the grass

as a flock of black birds.

When comes the night of your unmaking?

If this is the story of the mind, ferrying,

I am standing at the edge of some larger darkness:

bullfrog croaking, dusk falling into winter,

oncoming night cloaking first reeds then trees,

Q: What caused the breach?

A: I’d become mistrustful of beauty again.

each sound perforating the moment,

casting itself as a line across water.

When comes the night that made you?

Q: How do you measure the distance between

the girl you were and the woman you’ve become?

A: As I learned from her long ago,

with the riddle of the lemon, the answer is always one.

In Port-of-Spain I walked the Savannah, half-

expecting to see the photograph of her take form:

an English girl dressed as an Arabian Princess,

jumping in a Carnival Band. What did I think I

would find there? Birds in trees made present

their calls, which I at first mistook for laughter.

Q: Where are you from originally?

A: Who can speak the proper names of the dead?

In another country, I found myself

in the courtyard of a church, staring up

into the limbs of a walnut tree,

having been driven the day

past cypresses and olive groves.

Q: But how did you come to be here?

A: As we all do. I arrived a fat bundle of shit, piss,

and creaminess, unfit for this world.

In the distance I saw Nigüelas,

town of white-washed houses

crooked into mountains,

and I confessed

with such certainty I almost believed myself:

I will go there to live.

Q: I meant: How did you arrive in this country?

A: I walked into the Atlantic, as later in life

I would the Pacific and later still the Mediterranean,

each time thinking: It’s colder than the Caribbean.

On wherever I lay my gaze

sunlight congeals in the drawing room of childhood.

Light tumbles through louvers,

dust motes settle on wood.

Q: Why do you keep returning to the past?

A: When I was a child, I liked digging in the dirt.

I didn’t know what I was looking for. I was just digging.

Now I think it would have been better

not to have wanted so much,

Wanty, wanty—

not to have asked memory to act as the self’s map.

When comes the night of your unmaking?

Stories wake in us what is inconsolable,

begin in us again our animal mewling.

She fed pigeons. It didn’t matter they were dirty,

street birds, not tidy and pretty sing-song ones

like those in abundance where I live, chickadees

and wrens and finches flitting from mulberry to

maple to dogwood. She had no trees in her...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Note to the Reader
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Dedication
• Little Soul
• Memory
• To Red
• Race
• Madwoman as Salome
• The Parable of the Wayward Child
• Vesta to Madwoman
• Madwoman’s Geography
• The Story of Madwoman and Ixora
• Exile
• Lucea, Jamaica
• Journeying to Black River
• History and Myth
• The Story of Madwoman and Horse
• West Coast
• Parasol
• Madwoman in Middle Age
• Coda
• Fury
• Hour of Duppy and Dream
• Now I’m a Mother
• The Deer
• Manchineel
• Study of a Grasshopper
• Mother Love, a Blues
• The Parable of John Crow
• The Story of Madwoman and River Mumma
• Ten Things You Might Like to Know about Madwoman
• She
• The Parable of Shit and Flowers
• Why Madwoman Shouldn’t Read the News
• Madwoman to Her Deliverer
• The Story of Madwoman and Cockroach
• Running
• Madwoman Exiled
• Madwoman as Rasta Medusa
• Oh Abuse
• Salome to Madwoman
• Madwoman to Claudette Colvin
• Lot’s Wife to Madwoman
• Ode to the Apple
• Elegy
• Death
• Fable
• Elegy Blues
• You
• The Dream
• Sweetheart,
• Sorrow
• Insomnia
• I
• Invention
• Hyde Park
• Grief
• Madwoman Apocrypha
• About the Publisher