Mandy Hayden, M.A., RYT
Poet Laureate | Sinclair Community College
Professor | Religion, Philosophy, and Humanities
Course Coordinator | Religion and Humanities
Humanities, Government and Modern Languages Department
Pronouns: she, her, hers
https://windychickenpoet.com/
Mermaid Voices (A Tori Amos poem) by A.M. Hayden
For an atheist, she was terrified of ghosts, preferred hiding under floppy hats as little girl snake charmer, picking up a hissing garter on the trail to give it a rub against her cheek, cooing, it wants me to be its mommy, interrupting her own story about reading Virginia Woolf, who waded into the river with rocks weighing down her pockets to drown the voices, to wash away life they told her she was crazy in the same tone you give a woman a compliment, in admiration, in objectification, in transaction she knew to look to a woman to take care of her, to look to me to stop her from stumbling off cliff’s edge as she danced daises through her garnet hair, as she ignored locals’ warnings and glided her backstroke in the cloudy Rio Grande, she told me she wanted a mamba tattooed across her belly, but feared the pain sweet sting of infusion in her tender blushed skin, pink as a suckling piglet told me this as she swirled her one neon sandal from her fingertips, orphaned by the other still crevice wedged somewhere during canyon climb every guy she knew pointed her in the direction of her own destruction accompanied her to the edge singing sweetly to steady, to give illusion she could not stand on her own, clove cigarette smoke and mirrors when she was 11 her mother locked her in the bedroom closet, she told me, she screamed inside the slatted door as her mother recited scripture nearly choking on her duty to drive the demons out, she remembered her mother’s jaw trembling when she spoke in tongues, my mother would have been the one burning the witches, she said she always liked toast and she swore she would burn out young too just to spite her, her aching arms wrapped around herself, snuffed out before she could be stripped of her beauty and this is why I only feel air when I reach for her, she was always ether her words echoing against canyon walls, plunging deep into ocean’s abyss still waiting for shrilled chorus of mermaid voices to summon her again
*give me life, give me pain, give me myself again from Little Earthquakes, 1992.