Furies of Anne Gray Harvey: (content)

[heslopian]

For you, my confessor,
from the garter-belt of my soul;
for you the undergarments of my hell,
pressed upon the Hoffman. What's a Hoffman?
Pressed within the steam of a child god. Excellent line.

The room cocoons me like a shroud
I'm a penguin out of water, Did you say "penguin" because they're a flightless bird, as part of a metaphor-within-a-metaphor? I ask because it seems strange that you didn't just put "fish out of water" as opposed to this and the following line.
a fish out of oxygen;
facing the corner, crying poetry. I would say "crying poetry" is corny, but I feel as though I've read it before in a Sexton poem
Feeling myself through cotton knickers. Are the "cotton knickers" a reference to "Clothes"?
You father, who may think to sanitise me,
with your overbearing mouth.
You father, who may wish to own this parody of a sylph What's a "sylph"?
you have always owned me.
I hate you for owning.

Words for you mother,
my words, bee stings that branded you. Is this line a reference to "Said the Poet to the Analyst"?
Branded and stung you over and over,
Not lies but truths
hovering in your face, like a humming bird
sliding it's tongue down that selfish throat. "It's" shouldn't have an apostrophe when used in the possessive context.
You mother, who choked and gagged
like a toothless whore on them; This line was incredible. Though it isn't as obscene as a couple of the others it's still the most shocking line in the piece. I like it when a writer uses bad language well.
they were all of my own birthing.
Your schools did little for me,
though they taught me how to catch
the semen of my soon to be intended, This line doesn't feel like something Sexton would have written. I don't think she would have been so crude and blunt even in her later years. I also can't imagine her being that critical of her middle class schooling. Whatever else she was she was a WASP through and through.
mrs Gray Harvey, mother dear. "Mrs." should be written like so.

I see you loitering in my light,
like vampire moths ready to suck me,
ready to drink me; tête-a-tête.
I gave you poetry and you gave me what,
the catwalk, the dark catwalk
that gave you invisibility behind your garish flashbulbs? This is brilliant. Disregarding Sexton for a moment, everything from "the catwalk," to "flashbulbs?" is just great poetry.
why must it always be the dark, dark, dark.

My microphone; my husbands cock, "Husbands" needs an apostrophe before the second "s." The idea of her husband's cock being her microphone doesn't sit right with me. Her career as a poet was in sometimes violent opposition to her husband's wishes, so it seems strange to me to connect his phallus to her creative expression.
it/they listen like depraved monks
begging me to put out. Great line.
I live through it/them, wet with life and words.
Why do you husband, force me? The syntax here confused me a bit. I'd recommend putting another comma after "you." I feel alive and dead,
unsure which shoreline to follow.
Your grains of sand sharp and painful.

I know that much;
no don’t touch me, I’m alone without hands,
unable to reach out, whom can I touch --
Myself?
I know that much;
left in my naked reality
under a blanket of dark
light and isolation. a thorazine queen
barefoot and belt-less.
Will you feel me, my breasts,
my spine, a calf, the crease of me?
Feel them.
Bring me back.
Light me a cigarette.
Is anyone there, hello? Fantastic verse, as I've told you before.

I the canary sang
for you,
you who would allow me to be gassed
snuffed, like the flame of a paper match.
Even when you parted me I was alone;
ready to be impaled like a piece of pork
and left on the heat of dead coals. Everything after the semi-colon is perfect.

And I?
I rest with help, the fumes of carbon plumes
put my anguished self to sleep, read on the third,
dead on the fourth. The irony of death,
smoke inhalation to the extreme.
Sing me a cigarette in stilettos.
Sing me a vodka with olive.
Sing me a bed with Linda, divine Linda,
child of my fucking loins.
Loin of my unhappy thrush, song-less
among the dying magnolia.

I know that much;
I know of a girl in a room
Locked away like a dangerous thought. Again like I've told you before fantastic. The very last line sounds like it could have been lifted straight from a Sexton poem.

This must have been a hard poem for you to write as your personal is style is much less showy and more grounded in straightforward expression than Sexton's. Nevertheless you pull it off beautifully. Aside from maybe the semen line I never would have guessed, I don't think, that this was written by a man. That's how well you inhabit Sexton.