Confinement

Unwilling to stop reading my

child self sequestered a

small torch and

cocooned myself in sheets

long after bedtime

sucking in words and

oddly aroused by the

confusing smells of a

boy growing in

confinement.

Her Namesake Diana

In the black woods, under the

cloud-shuttered light of her

namesake Diana, her Mother

told her the secrets of being

chased yet chaste, of the

pleasures of the mouth, of

acquiring the taste for the

moon-coloured effluvia of a man, of the

unexpected utility as entrance of the

dark star between her buttocks, of

so many things that left her

shaking with the cold, embarrassment and the

first tremors of awakened lust.

 

Now, a Mother herself, she

looked back at the lit-up house where

her daughter and her latest boy were

supposed to be behaving, considered the

Pill she’d put her on, knew it was safer but

wondered if she had learnt more under the

protection of Myth, regretted the

degradation of the Heavens, knew

she had been more adventurous than her

well-protected daughter, heard again her

Mother’s voice, dead in the dark, echoless,

“It’s a Huntress Moon, not a Hunter’s”, under

her namesake Diana.

 

Charlotte

Though named for a rose she had

no desire to be one, watching the

girls at school primp and tweet,

display and slut, be

budded, bloomed and blown

before adulthood, so she

prayed she’d one day find a man who

knew more of a garden than just

dead-heading roses.