Written by Janina Aza Karpinska
[Dedicated to women unjustly incarcerated at Bethlem Asylum]
I’ve been dead many years. See these white arms?
Abracadaver! Of their own accord—they strangled
my child! Or, so I’ve been told.
A spectre from the here-after; resident in Pandemonium;
here to mend my ways, they say; and so, I sew.
I sew to mend, and ply these hands to better
purpose than to which they turned. A revenant:
I’ve long been absent from life: first bought into slavery
when I became wife. That knot tied fast,
and growing faster yet at each succeeding confinement, but
at every birth—as each cord was cut—I unravelled bit by bit.
So—pull on my winding-sheet as hard as you might—a skein
of ties, buckles, and spite—You touch me not. I and my child
are lost.
*Latin: literally: the unknown by the still more unknown; an explanation more unfamiliar than
the concept it seeks to explain.
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Janina Aza Karpinska (M.A. Creative Writing & Personal Development, with Merit, Sussex) writes in many different styles, published in:
Ekphrastic Review; Poems in the Waiting Room; Synchronized Chaos; London Reader; Sein und Werd: Magma; Cold Signal, and
Raising the Fifth, among others. She lives on the south coast of England.