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    The Nightgown & Other Poems
    The Nightgown & Other Poems
    The Nightgown & Other Poems
    Ebook103 pages59 minutes

    The Nightgown & Other Poems

    By Taisia Kitaiskaia

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    About this ebook

    The Nightgown is a mythic, mystic, and hungry collection of poems, a roiling landscape wandered over by wild swerves of language, creatures of all sorts, and mysterious beings such as The Folklore, The Hurt Opera, The Eunuch, and the titular angry Nightgown. Haunted by the magic and transformations of Slavic and Western European fairy tales, the symbolism of the Tarot, the medieval world, feminism, and a mythology all its own, The Nightgown bears an immigrant’s fascination with the black, alien syrup of the English language’s first stratum, that merciless Anglo-Saxon word-hoard preserving an ancient consciousness of human, beast, and earth. Funny and loud, the poems are strangely accessible in their animal awareness of mortality and urgency for contact with the unknown. The Nightgown is the debut book of poetry from renowned writer Taisia Kitaiskaia (Literary Witches: A Celebration of Magical Women Writers).

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherDeep Vellum Publishing
    Release dateSep 22, 2020
    ISBN9781646050284
    The Nightgown & Other Poems

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      Book preview

      The Nightgown & Other Poems - Taisia Kitaiskaia

      THE FOLKLORE

      Shortly after crawling from the river, the folklore

      Died of pernicious diseases. Died upside down

      In our wishing well, showing its bloomers.

      Someone spat on the folklore. Someone dipped

      The folklore, like a candle, in lye. Someone

      Washed the folklore’s corpse. Someone put

      The folklore under a sun lamp, but the folklore

      Did not revive. When I next saw the folklore,

      It was filing papers in a basement office,

      Trying to tip the vending machine over, loving

      The salty and the sweet. I shook out all the snacks,

      Now I am the ugly wife of the folklore, we kiss

      Our ugly faces together, clammy. We go out

      For ice cream, we love apples, we hold hands

      Under the table. We eat peanuts, wipe grease

      On our skirts, get married over and over. We

      Are tipsy in the hot afternoon, swaying along

      With the sunflowers. Once a year the folklore

      Rides away on a little pig, I weep in our manor,

      I shield my eyes with straw. Then the folklore

      Comes back with beads, honeycombs, GigaPets,

      We are in love again. Knocking against each other,

      Lurking in each other’s dreams like sharks.

      We go to the natural history museum, disappear

      Into the tanned cloaks of extinct peoples. We,

      Too, are extinct and rolling down a hill, scooped

      By grass. How much longer can we go on living,

      Dying, seeking the other in each inherited world.

      When you, the folklore, first swam towards me,

      You grabbed my ankles, you heaved

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