Erin Hoover


Given thee til the break of day

after William Blake


A mere hundred years I lived,
a woman trying her millennia 
of threesomes, my clipper ships 
full of whips and silk in long bolts,
malt liquor and floor mattresses
bearing the fruits of men. Honey,
you can put me down as earlier
than all those other feminists 
still turning D/s—like my colleague
claiming research, my oldest friend 
who texts me that the scene is corny,
though isn’t what we call knowledge
exactly that? Born in experience,
earned on these tits beat eggplant 
purple as a low ass-thump
on the right cheek, then on the left,
on my ancient nipples clamped
so hard they give up colostrum,
like my every beloved quality,
ethereal, a little gross. A gift,
the starry floor, the watery shore, 
twenty summers ago a man kept me
locked in a basement, raped me
on Egyptian cotton, and that has been, 
almost, the sum of my life. Are these 
words I’m holding? I didn’t cry until 
I asked a man to stop bruising me,
and by our agreed system, he stopped.

Father, -less


On the topic a woman1 is apt
to be minimized. Sometimes we turn
to incest, which I won’t entertain
as I call bullshit on Electra2—call more
bullshit on penis envy—except
the implied negation of a spoiled girl,
mere provision evoking ruin. Latin,
spolium: skin taken from a dead animal,
English: spoils, plunder, booty,
but consider the kinder, gentler tack
of the language, “to become unfit
for use; to go bad, decay.” Female
as fruit, as egg, her mind consumable
foodstuffs. Thus: ruin from what?3
This ideal of virginity, a fiction,
however much I once believed.4
I should announce to my father
the deviance embedded in those funds
he saved for my college, point
to the dictionary as my evidence. I mean
the men in my writing program5
all wrote about their fathers, who often
hunted or fished and made them feel
inadequate. This sweet little feeling—
to be kneaded until bestowing truths
thought universal—shared, presumably,
by the male teachers that had written
of their own fathers in canonical books
of unquestioned value. The cycle
continues. You would think that all
had been said about fathers, perhaps
speaking to one’s father could be handled
privately,6 need not involve writing
a book, a novel, a series, writing
a play, making a movie, forcing us all
to discuss these manifest artifacts
of the patriarchy, its tedious
male ideas, tedium without end
and all the same endlessly replicating.


1. ... who writes about her father, who else is there?

2. Per the APA Dictionary of Psychology, “the female counterpart of the Oedipus complex, involving the daughter’s love for her father, jealousy toward the mother, and blame of the mother for depriving her of a penis.”





3. And, can sons be spoiled? Is inheritance a spoilage?
4. I would have been comforted by the historical obsessiveness of what exactly comprised its “loss.”


5. This specific membership is widely available, but also unnecessary to locate as their/our subject is so universal.









6. I’m aware.

 

photo: Keistyn Steward

Erin Hoover is the author of two poetry collections: Barnburner (Elixir, 2018), which won the Antivenom Poetry Award and a Florida Book Award, and No Spare People (Black Lawrence, 2023). Her poems have appeared in The Best American Poetry and in journals such as Cincinnati Review, Poetry Northwest, Shenandoah, and The Sun. Hoover lives in Tennessee and teaches creative writing at Tennessee Tech University. She curates and hosts a poetry reading series, Sawmill Poetry, and produces the “Not Abandon, but Abide” monthly interview series for the Southern Review of Books. Her website is erinhooverpoet.com.

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