Rejected

A Rendez Vous

Great care was taken.

Veiled hints revealed.

Her tender arms aquiver.

Delicious breath filled the air.

Her bosom rose and fell.

She was powerless.

A whisper escaped 

her slightly parted lips.

Coursing blood warmed 

every inch of her body.

She did not stop.

A monstrous joy held her.

Hands upon her,

she opened herself,

bending.

Blind persistence,

kind, cruel.

The act of love.

The strongest impulse of her being!

The very elixir of life.

A shudder.

Feverish triumph in her eyes,

like a goddess.

Her waist and bottom 

in his grip…

The piercing cry of joy.

*Found poem from Kate Chopin’s The Story of an Hour

Gone

The year she resided in the streets

and gave her refusal to the young men.

Such monstrous hands urged,

a struggle.

Her opposition could not influence the conduct.

Distrust.

Disgusted by them wounding her.

Their cheerfulness she cannot bear.

The unpleasantness persisted.

Left, abandoned.

Recollecting objections,

the shock,

the attack.

Forced to…

Her usual gaiety, joy, happiness…

gone.

Her grief was eternal.

*Found poem from chapter 25 of Jane Austen’s Sense and Sensibility

The Heist

Robbing ensues,

the humming of stolen love.

Fiendish sentinels guard

the threshold of consequence,

suspicious and wary.

Capable of another clever trick,

the robber returns to plunder,

taking to appease something

empty, hopeless, and despairing.

Honey, look out for robbers.

*Found poem from chapter 15 of How to Keep Bees by Anna Botsford Comstock

A Woman in Distress

The needs of my body pulse 

and leave me undone, 

possessed, 

staggering.

Remember this frenzy 

when we meet again.

*Found poem from I, being born a woman and distressed by Edna St. Vincent Millay

***Photo by Jakayla Toney