Furies of Anne Gray Harvey: (content)

[addy]

This was truly a revelation. This was an fantastically done piece, especially considering how you wrote it in a voice and style so radically different from your usual. Beautiful, controlled, and you captured such a distinctly feminine perspective so well. I would never in a million years have guesses you could write Sexton like you just did, but damn. Fantastic job.

a few minor edits have been made but none that warrant a side by side showing.

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

The room cocoons me like a shroud
I'm a penguin out of water, Not sure "penguin" is the most effective
a fish out of oxygen;
facing the corner, crying poetry. I quite liked the touch of this... childish but says so very very much
Feeling myself through cotton knickers.
You father, who may think to sanitise me,
with your overbearing mouth.
You father, who may wish to own this parody of a sylph
you have always owned me.
I hate you for owning.

Words for you mother,
my words, bee stings that branded you.
Branded and stung you over and over,
Not lies but truths
hovering in your face, like a humming bird
sliding its tongue down that selfish throat. Really liked this, the darting energy you put into the image, when the discussion of "truth" could easily slip into the realm of heavyhanded
You mother, who choked and gagged
like a toothless whore on them;
they were all of my own birthing
Mrs. Gray Harvey, my mother dear.

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?
why must it always be the dark, dark, dark. Haunting

My microphone; my husband's cock,
it/they listen like depraved monks
begging me to put out.
I live through it/them, wet with life and words.
Why do you, husband, force me? I feel alive and dead,
unsure which shoreline to follow.
Your grains of sand sharp and painful. I like this, how the broadstroke image contracted into sensation

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? This is my favorite stanza

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. I like the general bright, burning feel you imparted in these lines...

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. ... and here smoky, the vogue of black and white and gray

I know that much;
I know of a girl in a room
Locked away like a dangerous thought. This felt a little short to me, a little abrupt, but I guess it's just because I wanted more of these beautiful lines