If you wonder why I couldn’t stay
consider how it felt to me:
that you would have lovingly flayed
the skin from my body
made it into your night shade
light diffused around you through me
[restrict]reached into my chest
caressing each rib
to remove my heart
for safekeeping
in your hands
That you would own my voice:
a ventriloquist’s doll, I would chant words
placed with infinite care on my tongue,
dance in patterns painstakingly choreographed
through the strings used to bind me
Understand that I had not understood
at the start
that what I offered was the least of intimacies[/restrict]
Jeannie Wallace McKeown lives in Grahamstown in the heart of the Eastern Cape, and takes her inspiration from both the wild beauty of the landscape which surrounds her and from the inner workings of the mind, heart and soul. She sees poetry as a means to make sense of day by day life, and a way to store moments in literary amber. Jeannie is a member of the 2014 Rhodes University MA in Creative Writing cohort.
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