White Oleander

cringe

fuck

you

insane

person

dissonant and querulous

my

gas tanks marked FULL

I glued them to sheets of paper. I give them back to you. Your own little slaves. Oh my God, they're in revolt. It's Spartacus, Rome is burning. Now sack it, Mother. Take what you can before it all burns to ash.

27

THE CRYSTALLINE DAYS of March, that rarest of seasons, came like a benediction, regal and scented with cedar and pine. Needle-cold winds rinsed every impurity from the air, so clear you could see the mountain ranges all the way to Riverside, crisp and denned as a paint-by-the-numbers kit, windclouds pluming off their powdered flanks like a PBS show about Everest. The news said snowline was down to four thousand feet. These were ultramarine days, trimmed in ermine, and the nights showed all their ten thousand stars, gleaming overhead like a proof, a calculus woven on the warp and weft of certain fundamental truths.

How clear it was without my mother behind my eyes. I was reborn, a Siamese twin who had finally been separated from its hated, cumbersome double. I woke early, expectant as a small child, to a world washed clean of my mother's poisonous fog, her milky miasmas. This sparkling blue, this March, would be my metaphor, my insignia, like Mary's robe, blue edged with ermine, midnight with diamonds. Who would I be now that I had taken myself back, to be Astrid Magnussen, finally, alone.

Dear Astrid,

Bravo! Though your letter as poetry leaves something to be desired, at least it indicates a spark, a capacity for fire which I never would have believed you possessed. But really, you cannot think you will cut yourself free of me so easily. Hive in you, in your bones, the delicate coils of your mind. I made you. I formed the thoughts you find, the moods you carry. Your blood whispers my name. Even in rebellion, you are mine.

You want my penitence, demand my shame!1 Why would you want me to be less than I am, so you could find it easier to dismiss me? I'd rather you think me grotesque, florid with fantasy.

I'm out of segregation, thank you for asking. Waiting for me on my restoration to Barneburg B was, among other missives, a letter from Harper's. Oh the praise, ajailhouse Plathl (Although I am no suicide, no baked poetess with my head among the potatoes.)

Do not give up on me so soon, Astrid. There are people who are interested in my case. I will not molder here like the Man in the Iron Mask. This is the millennium. Anything can happen. And if I had to be wrongly imprisoned to be noticed by Harper's — well. . . you could almost say it was worth it.

And to think, when I was out, a good day was a handwritten rejection from Dog Breath Review.

They're taking a long poem on bird themes — the prison crows, migratory geese, I even used the doves, remember them? On St. Andrew's Place. Of course you do. You remember everything. You were afraid of the ruined dovecote, wouldn't go out into the yard until I'd prodded among the clumps of ivy to scare off snakes.

You were always frightened of the wrong thing. I found the fact that the doves returned, though the chicken wire had long since given way to ivy, afar more troubling prospect.

You want to write me off? Try. Just realise when you 're cutting off the plank upon which you stand, which end of it is nailed to the ship.

I will survive, but will you? I have a following — I call them my children. Young pierced artists avid with admiration, they make their pilgrimage here from Fontana and Long Beach, Sonoma and San Bernardino, they come from as far away as Vancouver, B.C. And if I can say so, they are much more to my taste than trembling actresses with two-carat wedding bands. They claim a network of renegade feminists, lesbians, practitioners of Wicca and performance artists up and down the West Coast, a sort of Underground Goddess Train. They're ready to help me any way that they can; they are willing to forgive me anything. Why aren't you?

Your loving mother,

Masturbating Rot Crow

P.S. I have a surprise for you. I've just met with my new attorney, Susan D. Valeris. Recognise the name? Attorney for the feminine damned? The one in the black curls, red lips like those chattering windup teeth? She's come to exploit my martyrdom. I don't begrudge her. There's more than enough for everyone.

I stood in the doorway, watching the clouds rise from the mountains. They would not let her out. She killed a man, he was only thirty-two. Why should it matter that she was a poet, a jail-house Plath? A man was dead because of her. He wasn't perfect, he was selfish, a flawed person, so what. She would do it again, next time with even less reason. Look at what she did to Claire. I could not believe any attorney would consider representing her.

No, she was making this up. Trying to snare me, trip me up, stuff me back in her sack. It wasn't going to work, not anymore. I had freed myself from her strange womb, I would not be lured back. Let her wrap her new children in fantasy, conspire with them under the ficuses in the visitors yard. I knew exactly what there was to be frightened about. They had no idea there were snakes in the ivy.

IN FOURTH-PERIOD American history at Marshall High School, we were studying the Civil War. In the overcrowded classroom, students sat on windowsills and the bookcases in the back. The heat in the classroom wasn't working and Mr. Delgado wore a thick green sweater someone knitted for him. He wrote on the board, backhand, the word Gettysburg, as I tried to capture the rough weave of the sweater and his awkward stance on my lined notebook paper. Then I turned to my history book, open on the desk, with its photograph of the great battlefield.

I'd examined it at home under a magnifying glass. You couldn't see it without the glass, but the bodies in the photograph had no shoes, no guns, no uniforms. They lay on the short grass in their socks and their white eyes gazed at the clouded-over sky and you couldn't tell which side they were on. The landscape ended behind a row of