Bluebeard—I mean, bluebird—I
mean, blackbard squawking I AM
I AM I AM. Iambs in these darkling
trees. Mary Wroth wrought iron-clad
saplings, warped the edges into corsets.

He found a way into her leaves, black-
burying. We go blackberrying here, on
the edges of a river where I’ve found
a nest once, emptied, and my nest too.

Did I say blackbard, Dark Lady, rather
it is a blackbird calling you back to
the nest, back to me, egging you on,
your own you’re on your own, a room

emptied, like a shell, like a cell.
Do not leave me in verse, my inverese.

Or

There is no story without or:

either you

or

and we do not choose how auth/ors write us

unless perhaps:

story without or becomes
[pig]sty

we live in this disorderly distortedly un-or-edly sty story

Was it Calypso or Medusa who knew how to write that way,
without o[the]r[ing]
them us
without [auth]or[ity of men]?

I love you like a pig loves not being bacon:
a meme, a gif, a hog-if-fic ending,
trichinosis almost spells out story too.

The sty, the or, the the or-y of a st or-y
di-or-ders me, makes me—hungry for you.

Emily Bowles is a recovered academic in Wisconsin, whose writing draws on the lost voices of eighteenth-century women as a form of personal and political recovery work. Her first chapbook, (His Journal, My Stella) reworks the relationship between Jonathan Swift and Esther Johnson, and her forthcoming chapbook The Satisfactory Nothing of Girls reimagines Virginia Woolf's The Voyage Out in the context of COVID-19.