Allison Serraes is a graduate student at Florida Gulf Coast University, finishing her Master’s degree in English literature while teaching two sections of composition. Serraes says she hopes to continue on to get a Ph.D. in literature, focusing on poetry. Amy Tardif spoke to her beginning with who her influences are. Click here to read her poem:
The Word
Rivers.
The gaping
wound
between Tigris and Euphrates
Carotid and Femoral
is supposedly where that bloodline broke.
Where Adam’s ad hoc committee
nominated the extra-ribbed girl,
who had already been spending too much time
under trees
with creatures of only ribs and skin,
to take the punch out of paradise.
“Ribs”
cartilaginous
pairs guarding lateral walls:
protect the viscera.
Adam was too busy naming,
and she, too curious for significations,
walked labyrinths to the center.
“Viscera”
Organs of the trunk,
the internal cavity.
Liver, lungs, heart.
That’s when it broke –
with teeth to skin, tongue to palate,
he to her, she to serpent, serpent to the dust
that made its belly raw with stretching:
the utterance –
division
then blood,
her belly raw with stretching,
dust.
Eve
the sound of a smooth incision.
Septicemic generation
bloomed out of that delta
children
then foreheads
then tribes
bifurcating across the continent.
Forget the garden.
Remember the garden.
Then eat from the
wrought
iron
rails,
the oil, diamonds,
sweat shopping,
brown bellies raw with stretching.
Dost
thou remember
the first rule of the garden?
Dress it and keep it.
Protect the viscera.