After midnight Doubt seeps in though the gaps around my air conditioner
and comes to join me on the couch
Bathed in the mummifying haze of blue electric static
He wraps an arm around my shoulder
tips my head back
and kisses me full of fear.
— Janine Serioux
A curse of curves ties my hands behind my back;
twists my ankles together,
leaves me gagged in an attic somewhere.
Men of varying pedigree climb the stairs
to rub my lamp-like hips
and whisper their interpretation of affirmation,
willing these chains off for at least a moment,
to take for granted a wish.
— Janine Serioux
Why must you be a child all the time?
With those dark, knowing eyes
and just-five-more-minutes-please smile.
Can’t you see that I’m tired?
I don’t have the time to play with you.
Maybe Tanya and Tina let you get away with it
but I’m not one of your little friends.
Yet you still try to sneak your way into my bed
When will you outgrow this phase?
Creeping fingers caught in the cookie jar and all my
spilled milk.
‘Mama, how much longer you gonna make me wait?’
You know I hate it when you call me mama.
I don’t have the time to nurse you, burp you, or change you.
— Janine Serioux
Why do you hate the rain?
Who told you it would always be sunny?
How do you sustain a life in extreme?
When will you learn, green things must be earned?
— Janine Serioux
Congratulations on attaining this peculiar disability.
Forgive my morbidity but,
tell me, what does my skin look like sans color?
Since I am no longer black to you
I could not be grey either, since grey is a color too.
Perhaps you see me as truly colorless, a shape-shifter like water or air?
But even then, when the light bends through me
is it like looking through glass?
Am I to be just as brittle?
Can you still read the texture of my hair, the shape of my eyes and mouth?
Or is that more of the color you don’t see?
I must be a phantasm then.
No wonder you seem so scared,
All this pushback from a ghost.
What is it like to live a life so haunted?
And what do you see when you see yourself?
Can you see yourself?
Perhaps you are a ghost too.
— Janine Serioux
Some say small women can get away with wearing less.
Slim steel limbs and bud nipples on trim ribcages,
Skin fitted close like armor.
Their bodies hold a different revolt
That can be smuggled neatly in size 6 jeans.
They wage war in seed, planted within the walls of convention.
Then there are women like me
With thighs broad and lapping like riverbeds,
The body of a tree, branches bowed heavy with ripe fruit no matter the season.
How does one ready an orchard for battle?
How to shore up these shores?
What do you sheath this greenhouse in to prepare it for an onslaught?
— Janine Serioux
Stir to combine.
Fill a tub,
a bucket,
a sink,
a bowl,
a glass,
a thimble,
with water as warm as you can stand.
Pour in the salt
and stir.
Submerge your body
and soak
until your fingers prune
and the water clouds
with your doubt,
fears,
and anxiety.
Touch
every inch of the body
that was given to you by someone else
but is yours now.
(If you have a pumice stone,
now would be a good time
to slough off
those chips that have been weighing down your shoulders
and rid yourself
of all your
dead skin).
Pull the stopper from the tub
or sink.
Pour the water from the bucket,
bowl,
glass,
or thimble.
Say goodbye.
Rinse.
— Janine Serioux
One evening I lay in the bathtub and give birth to myself. near drowning in a pool of a lifetime of my mother’s tears; purified and desalinated, strained through the marrow of my grandmother’s bones, with a drop of my father’s blood, the water chilled by his distance. hands strange and familiar come from surprising distance to rub my shoulders raw with encouragement and rejection. my lover’s fingers curl playfully around my throat and gently push my head under water but I struggle to the surface every time and breathe anew. slow and steady like they said to. my distended belly bobs, sweet amorphous cumulus. Every gasp ragged with indecision and humbling fear. I will carry this sense to term.
English Major Adrift. 