The Séance

To Sylvia Plath

A trench coated fan of yours
slunk over to me

reciting bits of “Daddy.”
He accused me of butchering

your very essence
with my Mother poem.

His distaste for me so visceral, he was sick
to death. I laced up his black boots.

He stamped me back
into the ground.

He is deaf to the plush timbre
of your voice, feminine, fearless

always afraid, sore from months

of reciting one word, that word
scratched through, inserted into a new line

that line revised, shuffled, revisited
until the meaning blurs.

The whole poem is axed.

I have seen his kind.
He delves into your lines

deveins the words, guts the meanings
memorizes your images

the mirror, the lake,
the terrible fish rising like sewage,

He has never felt the fear of a blank page
white emptiness pulsating

against the back of our brains
like dying salmon

forcing the breath from our bodies
forcing us to become something

to produce, to lie
to be our own demise

He has never bled, drained
by the eventual thumping

of pen against paper
in the ritual of writing

the séance of a poem
that changes no one’s life but our own.

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