Pascale Petit: Two Poems

Jaguar Girl

Her gaze is tipped with curare,

 

her face farouche

from the kids’ asylum

 

where ice baths

failed to tame her.

 

Her claws are crescent moons

sharpened on lightning.

 

She swims through the star-splinters

of a mirror

 

and emerges snarling—

my were-mama.

 

She’s a rainforest

in a straitjacket.

 

Where she leaps

the sky comes alive, unleashed

from its bottle.

 

My mother, trying to conceal

her lithium tremor

 

as she carries the Amazon

on her back,

 

her rosettes of rivers

and oxbow lakes,

 

her clouds of chattering caciques,

her flocks of archangels.

 

Her own tongue is a hive

that stings

 

yet pollinates

all the orchids of the forest.

 

Her ears prick

to the growl of roots

 

under concrete,

the purr of plants growing.

 

My Animal Mother,

shaman’s bitch,

 

a highway bulldozed

through her brain,

 

shapeshifter

into a trembling rabbit

whenever I’m scared of her.

 

She who has had electric eels

pressed to her scalp

 

can vanish into backwoods

where no one can reach her.

 

I’m trying to sew her

back together,

 

to make a patchwork

of gold dust

and ghost vines,

 

a sylvan pelt

of torn-down trees,

 

the shadow dance

of leaves on litter.

 

I’m trying to conjure her

in her zoo cage

 

as the doctor comes

running to dart her.

Pascale Petit

 

Rainforest in the Sleep Room

    1

The highway goes through

the Amazon’s brain

like an ice pick through an eye-socket.

First we clear her synapses

then she forgets her animals.

    2

Our bulldozers drive through

the rainbow boa of her cortex

like a scalpel—

those sleeping coils

still dreaming up new species,

    3

hallucinations we’ve blitzed

with ECT.

The bilateral current purrs

through her frontal lobes

like a forest of songbirds

electrocuted by rain.

    4

Afterwards, her thoughts are nestless,

except for a few chicks

up in the last ironwoods,

patrolled by armed guards.

Scientists climb ropes

to monitor her stats,

bring motherless macaws

down to incubators,

measuring their wings,

weighing naked souls,

    5

as if she’s a patient

in the Sleep Room

who won’t wake—

her dreams treelines

traced by the EEG pen.

    6

The only animals left

are grainy films

on camera traps

    7

and a recording of the last

musician-wren

whose still small voice

is like the beginning of the world.