Joann Deiudicibus

Against Dawn

In response to “Double Rape, Lynching in India Exposes Caste Fault Lines”
by Julie McCarthy

It’s been said that for mangoes red does not mean ripe.
Why then did they take you from that tree, age 12,
only to tie you back to its branches? Torn
fruit cannot be returned by its stem to its root.
Didn’t they squeeze gently and feel you were not ready?
Couldn’t they judge by touch that your cousin was, too,
green at age 14—flesh pressing against thumbs in protest.
The aroma of womanhood had not yet infused the fields of your bodies.
In this place, mint, dung, and ash tour the nostrils,
casting a noxious concoction of sweet necrosis.
How you dangled there from fallopian branches,
paisley eggs fashionably sashed, swaying alongside leaves.
“And when they cannot control us, they kill us,”
a woman said. To be suspended by men
is the only way to reach their height:
a dream of weightless feet floating against dawn.

Published in Calling All Poets 20^th Anniversary Anthology


Rewriting Your Obituary

For Pauline

Your wind-blown body
drops to diamond dust,
refuses retort; sweeps beaches
and street festivals where party-goers
don hula hoops, swimsuits: tiki-voodoo
darlings delighting in your light.

Where you fall now does not track.
Still, I listen in the gloaming for star-strands
spun into sentences, where wave-break
waits, resuscitating summer.

Published in The Shawangunk Review, Vol. XXXII


This Poem Needs You

For Bob Singleton

This poem needs a day off,
a night to itself with its thoughts
screaming hushed nothings
as it drifts off, god knows not where.

This poem needs a new coat
to wear against winter and words,
a map through snow squalls
that bleach meaning from vision.

This poem needs a cat
that won’t stay inside or out,
that lives on laps, or disappears
into darkness, depending on the day.

This poem has your eyes,
but cannot see where it’s going.
This poem needs you to tell it
what to do. This poem needs you.

Published in Lightwood


About the Author

Joann Deiudicibus teaches writing in New York's Hudson Valley. Her chapbook, Lost & Found is forthcoming from Finishing Line Press (Fall 2024). Her poems and essays about poetry appear in WaterWrites, A Slant of Light, & Reflecting Pool (Codhill Press), Comstock Review, Contemporary Haibun Online, Drifting Sands, Typishly, Stone Poetry Quarterly, The Shawangunk Review, Calling All Poets Anthologies, Chronogram, Lightwood, as well as Affective Disorder and the Writing Life (Palgrave Macmillan). Ask her about true crime, cats, and confessionalism.

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