the daughters play with corpses
BY MADDIE CLEVENSTINE
South Carolina Governor’s School for the Arts & Humanities, ’16
2016 Adroit Prize for Poetry: Editors’ List
After Karolin Kluppel’s photo series entitled “Kingdom of Girls”
i.
here, dirt becomes mud on weekdays,
rain soaked girls gunning through
rivers, copper caught between teeth as
they slide dresses over stork bodies,
arms thin like stalks. in photos they eye
cameras, chest raised with something
to prove, play charged for the attention.
here, girls don’t know how to miss
fathers, raised instead by mother’s eldest
brother, games spreading them across
fields torn by work, freckled wheat boxed
and brought home at the end of work
days. my experiences lack this same
texture, this splintered home attempting
to become its own kind of kingdom,
my sisters and i walking hallways naked
because we can, because men no longer
live here, my father’s belongings
picked clean, packaged in brown boxes.
we imagine ourselves as leaders
of a torn town tucked between mountains,
grasping bones to use as necklaces,
claw joints adorning collarbones, this
an act of separation that’s not focused enough,
the earth unfamiliar with the way we hold
it, cupped in plastic mugs given by our
father, meant to be something other than trash
that can’t be decayed.
ii.
where bones stop and fur begins
your daughter grips deer hooves as big
as your hands, marches forward as if
she doesn’t see you standing half-
full like a milk jug left for weeks.
these carcasses are her playthings,
pulled apart corpses extended in whatever
half-motion stopped them dead:
i want to send these photos to my father,
wrapped in pink and gold newspaper
print, edges frayed. he’ll think this means
forgiveness, means i’ve stopped thinking
how the girl’s curved back towards
dirt is almost a prayer, her childhood still
round and earthen, faces shorn by fathers
unpicking animals. he can’t know
this is another one of those reminders
for the time my youngest sister dug
underneath mountains made of multi-
colored cotton, refused to move
from her closet, kept waiting for someone
to find her. no one did, no one even
thought to look.
iii.
green winged insects crawl the expanse of
a village girl’s cheeks, circle her eyelids,
rest delicate toes in between lips left open
for air. she won’t dart them away, hands
flat against her pant leg. these bugs could
make homes on her neck, lie in the creased
fold of ear, sleep atop shoulder
blade and this girl wouldn’t move,
wouldn’t find any reason to shake them
away. i know different, at home
my father taught slaughter, taught waiting
until bug touched down for an easier angle,
guts coloring yellowed walls. a game
for most dead, his daughters pinching tissue
between fingers, watching beetle legs pump up
cabinets, wings folded against bodies
trying for speed, trying to outrace young
hands. they don’t know we’d rather watch
them roam, father no longer around to keep
tally of all the times we win, no pride
in body parts staining every surface spotted,
leaves the house quiet enough to hear
everything, a reminder that all days have sound.