Poetry | Summer 2022

Lady of Situations

by Jade Oates

with watercolor by Jade Oates and polaroid photographs by Ashley Cassandras

Belladonna 

Still and stoic as a concrete sphinx 

Belladonna observes the old men’s chess boards–

Knights side-stepping castles

To the sound of a passing subwoofer–

The rap remix to rehash Waterloo–

And this tattooed lady observes the battlefield

Smoking a cigarette, from her casual seat 

Upon the plaza’s stage, rising around her in a half dome:

Belladonna is a saint in her sudden niche

And from this vantage, the wavering spray of the fountain 

Joins her upward curling smoke

To form her veil…

Here is Belladonna

Lady of the Rocks

Sitting straight-backed in her grotto

As a mad man, dark and unwashed, drifts by

Shouting at the fountain

“Fear death by water!”

Belladonna–Beautiful Lady–

Is calm and still, looking into his wild face and pearly eyes

The clock tower chimes–

“Die! Die!” the mad man cries

And still she holds his gaze 

With her halfmoon eyes

Around his sweat stained temples 

Buzz the maddening flies:

Around the plaza’s edge 

Traffic roars by

Even the fountain is bubbling with bedlam

But Belladonna holds a stillness deep within

Belladonna–Lady of Situations 

Exhales the smoke

To continue her calculation

She is the concrete center, holding

Watchful, with her inward eye,

While on and on the mad man cries

Dog at the Door 

Ants invade the kitchen

In summer’s thunderstorm,

And the Beast is at the door

Mangy and emaciated, 

Howling with the wind

Already on about how he’s going to leave again

And I–a lady with silver bracelets and dress of linen–

I bring the tramp in.

His breath is beer and smoke,

His shirt is wet with sweat, 

And as he rages and sulks between the ant trails

They stampede up his legs–he flails–

At the lightning flash, they overtake him.

He howls that he’ll gnaw off his own leg to escape them.

Thunder overhead and he is the lightning bolt 

Bound in creeping darkness

I try to save him, brush away the plague.

But as I nurse him with water and acetaminophen,

I find that sober isn’t how I want him–

Soft and limp 

A drowsy child with pouting-baby lips

Washed and swaddled in white blanket

He falls asleep: harmless

I lie awake then, 

Wishing for the rogue to return–

Wishing for lightning and thunder– 

For someone or something to burn.

Clock goes on ticking, 

Sleeping beast snores

I lie awake, waiting 

For the dog at the door.

Scheherazade 

When her young sisters heard that she was marrying Shahryar, they yelped in horror. 

“Shh” she tried to calm them, “I have a plan.”

That night she found a drawing of a woman cutting off a man’s head on her bedside table. 

“Judith slaying Holofernes” was scrolled on the margin.

Undressing for bed, she considered her body in the mirror, imagining the way the king would examine it, ticking off points for the stretch marks on her hips or the stubborn cellulite on her upper thighs, the breasts not quite as voluptuously formed as the last wife. Gazing into her own eyes, she wondered how many women before her hoped to be beautiful enough to stay the king’s hand, to look at him with eyes so innocent and pleading that he would at last find mercy within his hardened heart. She could not imagine looking at him with anything but disdain. The king Shahryar married a virgin everyday, and killed her on their wedding night. This mad king was responsible for the death of her cousins and dearest friend. Scheherazade hated him; she watched the hate carve her face with stoney anger, hardening her into the image of a disciplined warrior, tensed for battle. 

Shahryar is caught by the steely glimmer of this warrior maiden's eyes on the night of their wedding. Scheherazade doesn’t look at him with that pleading look he’s become accustomed to. She looks at him with the simple innocence of an honest adversary. She appears calm and stoic as a military general seated on a silk cushion by the hookah in their wedding suite. She looks straight into his eyes. When her little sister Dunyazad asks Scheherazade to tell a story, Shahryar is impressed by the slow steady tamber of her voice, unshaken by the certain death she faces in the morning. As she speaks, her lilting voice rocks the king to gentle repose on his silk pillow. She tells a tale of a heroic man’s chivalry and adventures. Before dawn begins to gleam through the palace’s gauzy curtains, Shahryar has fallen asleep and Scheherazade has not yet finished her tale. Scheherazade looks upon him. Now is the moment she  unsheathes her blade to slay the wretch who killed so many women she loved so dearly. She may take revenge for all of them. 

What stays her hand? In his gentle repose upon the pillow, the king's face is changed. Looking at his peaceful sleeping face, his gentle relaxation, she sees not an evil man, but someone’s beloved son. A strange feeling arises in her and she searches his face. What does he remind her of? He sleeps like someone’s baby boy–she can’t remember whose–she used to hold and rock all night long. She would stare into those babies' eyes while it nursed, rocking slowly by the palace’s fireplace while the king would rest his hand on her shoulder and she would go on singing stories… her own baby. Her stoney warrior’s face breaks then with childlike fear. With a new horror she realizes: It is not a memory of someone else’s baby, but a memory of a forgotten dream–a dream of her future. An awful clarity rings in her ears like a bell. Scheherazade understands that she will bear Shahryar’s son. Maybe she is already pregnant with this baby boy she sees flickering on the king’s face like a mirage. She loves the man. She hates the baby. Or no, she hates the man and loves the baby. Staring into his face, her hatred and love become hopelessly woven together. Two strings of fate she thought were never meant to cross fold into an impossible knot within her.  

“What are you waiting for!” Dunyazad finally whispers with impatience. 

Scheherazade looks at the blade in her hand and then back to the monstrous king. His sleeping face is still flickering with the image of their son. 

“Damn,” she whispers, and tosses the knife out the window. 

“What are –” Dunyazad starts.

“We have a new plan,” Scheherazade sighs. She is tying her robe as the first rays of dawn shine in through the palace’s gauzy curtains. 

“What sort of plan?” Dunyazad asks in indignation. 

“I’m not going to kill the king,” Scheherazade whispers bitterly. “I’ll have to think of some other way to save us all.”

Orpheia

Orpheia was golden in the summer fields at noon,

Standing on her bike pedals, racing the boys to the river.

But in the evening light after dinner she radiated blue

Like TV glow from the living room

 – Mother called her Little Moon.

She didn’t braid her hair that night, or giggle with her sisters 

brushing their teeth in that bathroom mirror–

She slipped out of the girls’ bedroom window

Without shoes, snuck over the garden wall

And floated through the forest’s gloom

Following the orange torches a few yards ahead

carried by the boys toward the fire pits.

Through the trees they smell sulphuric

There, the drum beats shake the leaves 

Shadows loom against the trunks of trees

And Orpheia huddles in her cloak by a low branch 

And waits. And in her stillness the night blossoms around her–

by the sounds of the wind and the howls of men,

The clouds overhead clear away.

By the light of the fire, 

She watches their shapeshifting, the boys

Of her daytime game, Covered in black tar, oil, and ash 

turned to werewolves and monsters, 

led by their fathers. They wrestle and roar 

and throw their strange new bodies against each other

In raucous rage and delight. They are the stuff of nightmares–

Orpheia has already seen what women must not see

When the stairway opens up to the gate of Hades. 

Eurydico descends–her dearest friend–

Fastest boy in the school yard–moves toward death

Eyes gone blind, arms stretched wide and leather winged

Now a carnivorous bat, his human form does not return. 

So he flies down into that abyss

And she watches in horror waiting for a man to stop him, to save him

But no one moves. And in a sudden instant, 

Orpheia leaps upon the stairs and descends

Just before the doorway closes.

Atop the stairs Orpheia hangs like a moon over Hades

Illuminating the darkest corners with her casual light

Before her eyes adjust to blacker night

The creatures of hell are already petrified by her glow

They stare at her in horror, cover their eyes 

As if to defend themselves from the blue fire of her gaze

Halted by her presence, Count Ugolino stops gnawing Yorick’s skull;

The Geminis (sawing off their own limbs

each to sacrifice to the other) pause;

Even the cannibal king of Toriat halts his procession of youths. 

And Hades himself cannot deny Orpheia burning like a votive at the top of the stairs

Iris was there gathering water from the river Styxx,

She understood Orpheia’s innocence:

A girl so green in love she does not understand 

why she has followed the boy into Hell 

So Iris steps forward as Eurydico’s eyes

“Call to him Orpheia, he is a blind bat, 

he cannot see you as everyone else does”

As her eyes adjust to Hades, her bold courage wavers

For the first time that night Orpheia is scared, 

and angry at Eurydico for bringing her here

Forgetting that she made herself into a secret spy,

“Eurydico! Eurydico!” she cries, “Let’s get out of this awful place! 

Let’s go home! You should be ashamed of yourself!” 

He is ashamed; flying blind in the shades,

he wants to forget the world,

is longing to lose himself completely to shadow.

He tries to wrap himself in it more deeply

But Orpheia’s admonition–ringing into the abyss

–cuts through his darkness like a lightning bolt 

Drawing his ocean of shadow to a lower tide. 

“Sing!” Iris urges her. And little Orpheia– 

Little Moon– begins to sing a lover’s tune. 

By the sound of her voice Eurydico sees clearly:

Like a flashlight shining deep in the abyss, it bounces off jagged cavern walls,

her song by the depths distorted into piercing screams

And by these sharp sounds, he finds his way–

Toward the upper shades, where her shrieks bend slowly back into love’s melody

And he sighs with all the tortured men of Hell, at the feeling of a soothing wind passing over them;

Eurydico is reminded of a girl he knew (“Who, who? … Orpheia.” He remembers her)

and a world he wants to recall– He thinks he does not have to be alone after all. 

The gates open up again, morning light pouring in, 

and suddenly he is walking–with human legs, 

in a boy’s form again–up the stairs, behind the girl, gazing at him.

They emerge as dawn breaks through trees, eyes fixed on each other, 

Hand-holding and heavy-breathing, they walk back to the world of the living.