The Nightgown & Other Poems

Taisia Kitaiskaia

• Publisher: Deep Vellum Publishing
• Year: 2020
• Print ISBN:
  9781646050277
• eBook ISBN:
  9781646050284
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: European Poetry
• Index: Literature

The Nightgown is a mythic, mystic, and hungry collection of poems, a roiling landscape wandered over by wild swerves of language, creatures of all sorts, and mysterious beings such as The Folklore, The Hurt Opera, The Eunuch, and the titular angry Nightgown. Haunted by the magic and transformations of Slavic and Western European fairy tales, the symbolism of the Tarot, the medieval world, feminism, and a mythology all its own, The Nightgown bears an immigrant's fascination with the black, alien syrup of the English language's first stratum, that merciless Anglo-Saxon word-hoard preserving an ancient consciousness of human, beast, and earth. Funny and loud, the poems are strangely accessible in their animal awareness of mortality and urgency for contact with the unknown. The Nightgown is the debut book of poetry from renowned writer Taisia Kitaiskaia ( Literary Witches: A Celebration of Magical Women Writers ).

SONG OF MY SELF-LOATHING (PART ONE)

I could suck the sweat from my socks and live off the salt for a thousand years.

I could make houses from my snot, and if soldiers were to come and stomp all over my toes they would die before completing their task, such is the hideous number of my appendages.

If all the marbles of my shyness were released into the streets, no one would ever walk upright again.

If everyone else’s eyeballs went dim, the sum of that low-wattage couldn’t hold a dead lightbulb to the darkness of my vision.

Whole villages have been killed picnicking in the minefields of my atrocities.

I am so self-loathing that I cannot continue, but I will continue out of self-loathing.

Under the law and muck of my confusion I go running.

I place cold hands on my back, and remove them, and call myself home to the tiny dark oven of myself,

Where my self-loathing is king and queen and walks with a nightstick in its hands.

Drunks give fumbled toasts to my foolishness,

And toasters are dumped daily into that river, already thick with dead dogs and lined with raccoons washing their hands.

As I have only located three thoughts in my entire skull, I conclude that instead of brains I have an enormous whale spilling out of my head, slapping at the shore.

Children are afraid of the lopsided way I walk, trying to hold the whale in.

Only the most awkward of birds attend to me, the pelican, the dodo, the heron.

Once my self-loathing was wrapped in newspaper and carried in the arms of an old woman across the street.

But my self-loathing quickly swallowed the newspaper, the old woman, and the street. It is swallowing all of us right now.

There are ballrooms of empty coatracks for every time I did not come to the aid of another.

Forests where books run rampant, raised by wolves because I never opened their pages.

No one escapes the hounds running from the hills of my self-loathing.

My self-loathing is large enough to be a shelter to all, a tent city of refugees.

For I planted my self-loathing in the right season, and it grew immense and gorgeous.

THE MINISTRY OF CROWS

This is the black field my shame drains to,

Where a lady burnishes her face, hiding

In a shawl. Every time a mean thing is said,

The field widens and someone falls in.

The Ministry of Crows circles over, scavenges.

I walk the perimeter and win a cake. Clap clap

Black applause and I go bobbing for apples

In a black river. I lay the paint on thick

So it can live on my wall forever. My ear

Against the world is. My ear against the world

Is dull. But brightening. Wincing traveller,

To wear red shoes in this life is to eat cinnamon

In the next. To die by bear now means a heavy,

Well-haired heart later. Today is moms and TV,

Tomorrow is milk and walks along a dragon’s back.

Wisdom, you popped out like a prairie dog,

Then left a husk. Are you mammal

Or snake? Friends with everyone or no one?

My ear is pressed against foul winds. My eye

Wanders to the twigs. The Ministry of Crows says:

Swollen with river will be your thirsty bushels.

MY EVIL POTATO

Wouldn’t it be lovely to make a million dollars and feed

No one but myself, for hours, in a high lonely castle

Of brocade and crimson, my head a fishhead drooling,

Antlers growing out of my legs, my tongue

Parchment unrolling over the soup?

In the black wood outside, the roaming

Becomes a girl gathering red currants.

My evil potato sprouts eyes

And limbs. We go walking arm in arm

Through the forest and into the desert,

Where a figure brings hungry water to a dry cloak,

Where the dark hungers after the desert water,

Where the water is cloaked in dry hunger.

ORIGIN STORY

I was born into a shopping cart, pushed through a parking lot

By a manic aunt. I was just a skeleton then, but already waving

Like a mayor, though only the secret trashcan women were out.

My aunt’s eyes were wild, she had insane wheat brewing

The field over, she’d spent all her money on overpriced

Notebooks, her torso was woozy with bad decision Tetris.

I cowered, my skeleton pelvis rattled against the metal cart.

Oddly, the trees weren’t changing much, no matter how far

We ran, they all sang the same nursery rhymes and patted

Me down with their big hands. I had my first rash of beauty

When the night began slow dancing with a whistle from

Earlier in the evening, which remembered itself as we passed.

The whistle laughed in the night’s arms. With a pang I knew

This romance would end, whistle and night would become

Simple farmers, combing our foreheads over with rakes,

But the pang eased as I thought of human extinction and

The slow growth of species over the earth, its face restful

As a mother turning on the microwave. So gradually, over

The course of the shopping cart ride, I learned to speak

In a manner hospitable to plants, in a manner hospitable

To humans and the cows who raise them from the dead,

In a manner that wouldn’t embarrass my windmill and cause

Him to cover his eyes with his arms. The convenience store

Milk jugs were sweating, and the parking lot dog’s head

Was an angry basket of flowers, considering. I could feel

My aunt getting tired at last, we’d been running forever,

And by the time my childhood ended, my aunt, she was gone.

How the worms moaned and turned over in their living

Graves that night! I walked home in electronic rags,

As if Zeus had ripped up a lightning bolt to make me,

A loose collection. The flower-dog was now a toilet

Calm and white; then a refrigerator, murderous with

Weight, groaning with meaning; then a bunch of forks

Dumped into the sink at once. The vibe was decidedly

Domestic but I was still learning the ways of the world,

So I tied ribbons over my face, fell asleep in my own palm.

When I woke up, whatever is out there, always ranging,

Sniffed me over at great length, like I was an angel

Carved from s...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• The Folklore
• The Hurt Opera
• My Time with the Angels
• My Evil Twin
• Hour of Monks
• The Nightgown
• Time Is a Bride
• Thumbelina
• Wept All Day, Didn’t Know Why
• Eunuch
• Lady Butter
• The Hobbler
• The Priest
• High Priestess
• Our Lady of the Ropes
• Tapestry with Maiden
• Hierophant
• Kroshechka Havroshechka
• Hermit
• Then Always the Sea
• Rabbitcatcher of My Moods
• Many Lives
• Can I Be a Man of God?
• Nothing Scares Me
• A Small Man Gathers Twigs in the Black Hour
• Reader
• Twelve Days of Wedding
• Everyone Is Welcome at a Wedding
• Blood Hare
• Because I Am a Thick Broad
• Husband, I Am a Scary Cauldron
• The Wild Freedom of Being Unloved
• Saturday Evening
• Should We Have a Baby?
• I Visit My Oracle
• Speak Plainly! (A Demand)
• She Spits & Touches Her Tongue to Her Lungs
• Anglo-Saxon
• Solacer
• Anglo-Saxon (2)
• What Do Asparagus Dream of? They Dream of Blood
• Goodnight, Soliloquoy
• The Miracle Smacked Me
• No Ifs or Buts, Only Ands
• Song of My Self-Loathing (Part One)
• The Ministry of Crows
• My Evil Potato
• Origin Story
• Poverty Bucket
• Bog People
• Administrative Assistant
• Nightwalk
• Cryptozoology
• Reader (2)
• Acknowledgments
• The Author