June 7, 2022

Katie Bickham

LISA

There was a time the smiling lady
saw the world unguarded—nothing
between her eyes and the eyes
of her admirers. She’d felt naked, then,
in her frame, even in all those heavy clothes,
but liked it. Her smile had been real,
the kind that came without thinking
like a breath. The kind that almost
dared them: “Touch me.”
 
But then, one did. He stole her
in the Parisian night, kept her locked away
beneath his floorboards.
He’d say later he meant to take her home,
back to Florence where she belonged,
that it had all been a valiant rescue,
knight and damsel sort of thing,
but she knew, smiling in the damp dark
under his feet. He’d wanted only
to own, to feel her under him, to have her
chaste and smiling, locked up tight.
 
She was found, of course,
brought back into the light,
returned to her perch, but by then
she was legend, the smiling lady
who no man could resist. And that smile dared more,
thought those who gazed upon it.
One man tried to take a razorblade to her,
desperate to see what was hiding
between those wry closed lips.
The next threw a stone, like in the old stories
about what happened to women
who gave their smiles too freely.
 
But by then, like all too-beautiful
women, she’d been placed behind a wall
of glass. Thick like armor. Like bars.
The smile, then fixed in place,
felt sour on her face, but necessary.
You cannot hurt me, it seemed to say.
 
But that is its own kind of dare.
In the decades that followed,
a man would throw acid at her—
hungry for the power of having ruined
something beautiful. She was sprayed
with red paint, accosted by a thrown
teacup that shattered, the glass laughing,
and she, smiling, as a woman must
whom nothing can ever hurt, or ever touch.
They all had their reasons, perhaps
even good ones.
 
This week, a man smeared the glass
with cake frosting, sugared and glistening
under the measured light. He said
he was doing it to save the world,
because her smile was the world, and anyone
who could dirty it would be the world
as well, anyone who could shake it,
destroy it, could call it his own.
 
She smiled, as she does, longing, oddly,
to taste it, to feel something soft,
something sweet on her curved lips.
But it was cleaned away quickly,
glass sprayed and sterilized,
and the man with the cloths didn’t even glance
through the glass at her while he worked.
 
When they all leave in the evenings,
when the lights are turned low and she is alone,
she considers closing her eyes,
letting the tired muscles in her cheeks
go slack. She wishes, even for a moment,
to glance back over her own shoulder
at the horizon line, hazy in the distance.
 
How far away the years of smiling
truly. How long it has been since she’s felt
the air on her own face, smelled the sweetness
of a new child who has come to smile back at her,
truly. She catches her own reflection
in the low-lit glass. The smile that dared,
that once was real and offered something up,
 
looks tired at the corners, she imagines,
but goes on smiling all the same.
Tonight, eyes fixed open, smiling
in the way a woman must to get by
in this world, she decides
she will no longer dream of being free,
of baby’s breath or sweetness on her tongue.
 
She dreams of equally impossible things.
Of blades, of acid, of stones.
 

from Poets Respond
June 7, 2022

__________

Katie Bickham: “While reading this week that the Mona Lisa had been smeared with cake by a man dressed as a woman in a wheelchair, a follow-up article also listed all of the times the smiling lady has been stolen or vandalized in the past, and it was quite a list. Sometimes the causes even seemed noble. But I always like to remember that every historical figure was also a person, and I imagined her as a person, and then as a woman in particular, forever smiling even has she spends the rest of her life behind glass, forever watching people alternately admire her or try to ruin her for daring to smile.” (web)

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April 3, 2019

Katie Bickham

THE BLADES

In the new world, as the goddess dictated,
each time a man touched a woman against
her will, each time he exposed himself,
each time he whistled, dropped something
in her drink, photographed her in secret

she sprouted a wing from her spine. Not feathered,
like birds or angels, not cellular, translucent,
veined like dragonflies, but a wing
like a blade, like a sword hammered flat,
thin as paper. One wing per wrong.

At first, the women lamented. All their dresses
needed altering, their blankets shredded,
their own hair sliced off like a whisper
if it grew down their backs. And those
misused by fathers, bosses, drunken strangers

evening after evening were blade-ridden,
their statures curved downward like sorrow
under such weight. But this was not the old world
of red letters or mouthfuls of unspoken names,
not the old world of women folded

around their secrets like envelopes, of stark
rooms where men asked what they’d done
to deserve this. And the goddess whispered
to the women in their dreams, and they awakened,
startled, and knew the truth.

They pinned up their hair, walked out into the morning,
their blades glittering in the sun, sistering
them to each other. They searched for the woman
with the most blades, found her unable to stand,
left for dead, nearly crushed beneath the blades’ weight.

They called her queen. They lifted her with hands
gentle as questions, flung her into the air,
saw her snap straight, beat the wings at last,
and they followed her, a swarm of them, terrible
and thrumming, to put the blades to use.

from Rattle #62, Winter 2018
Readers’ Choice Award Winner

__________

Katie Bickham: “When women are assaulted or raped, there seems to be a lot of pressure from friends, family, and even therapists to find peace, forgive, move on. When do women get a moment to be mad as hell for a change? Is it because vengeance isn’t feminine or attractive? Or is it because people know that if all of us who have ever been touched wrongly were to speak our own names all at once, the sheer volume of it would be deafening. This poem imagines that vengeance, that moment when finally, instead of being asked to heal and forgive, we are allowed the rage that is rightfully ours. We become the weapons that are used to take our power.” (web)

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October 5, 2017

Katie Bickham

THE FERRYMAN

The ferryman is counting up his fares
as blood congeals and stains and spills and clots.
It’s cash or coin. No cards. No thoughts and prayers.

A mother tears her clothes, a boy despairs.
Their vigils litter cities lit with dots.
The ferryman is trembling, counting fares.

He’s had to buy new oars, to make repairs,
stays up nights counting bullets, mopping spots
of blood off of his deck: the thoughts and prayers

just one more thing needs sweeping, extra cares
tossed on his shoulders already in knots.
A better boatman wouldn’t bear such cares.

I have my work, and up there, they have theirs,
he tells himself, but jumps when he hears shots.
So many. He can’t stand to count the fares.
He navigates a river red with prayers.

from Poets Respond
October 5, 2017

__________

Katie Bickham: “Those of us who have been paying attention to mass shootings and working and calling out for years for something to be done legislatively—many of us at least—have checked out. Hopelessness has settled onto us like a heavy blanket, and there is a strange sense of finality in the air. Las Vegas is where we are. After Newtown, where else was there for us to go?” (website)

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July 21, 2017

Katie Bickham

A DIFFERENT ANIMAL

1

Early in the morning, I ghosted 
into the white tile bathroom, stripped—
even my jewelry—

drove myself to vomit, spit, 
and defecate, shook out the ounces of my breath,
and took my weight. I avoided my crooked

reflection in the silver towel rack.
The worst days, I pondered quarters
of pounds harbored in my tonsils and my hair.

Eighteen summers, I silently mined
my body, seeking the fossil
of my skeleton inside me.

My mother watched me swallow
syruped squares of French toast.
She knew and didn’t know.

My death dangled on the edge
of every conversation,
a desperate drop on a cup’s rim. 

Humans facing death in youth
try to swallow everything, cry injustice, 
make wishes, hold their breath.

Dogs refuse food. When Sophie,
our Labrador, faced her end too soon,
my mother crawled beside her

with warm beef stew and my soft 
baby spoon. The dog died,
salivating.

2

I walked down the aisle with whale bones
circling my ribcage. I pictured the whale
vomiting Jonah onto the beach.

I had never purged in church
until that day. God was alive 
in those years and I knew

he saw me, corseted,
flowers fastened in my hair,
and looked away.

My husband tells me years later
the horror
of my torso from the room’s other end.

I feel proud,
but do not 
say it.

3

My doe-eyed mutt stands in the corner 
of the bathroom, watching me heave
my whole life into the toilet

on all fours. I suspect she’s always thought
we were the same—that I was
just another sort of dog

until this moment. She knows now,
I am a different animal entirely:
a creature dragging back

to its own ooze, a broken beast, rotten
with a sickness she can smell. And she
can’t tell a soul. 

After I’ve scrubbed my hand,
my weak teeth, I kneel again
and pat my knee.

Because she is a dog, she comes quickly
and fills my palms with her heavy head.
Starving, I let her love me.

from Rattle #56, Summer 2017
Tribute to Poets with Mental Illness

[download audio]

__________

Katie Bickham: “Eating disorder is the mental illness with the highest mortality rate, and I have been wrestling with it for over a decade now. Disordered eating is one of the strangest mental illnesses, because it’s one that the sufferer almost always wants to have on some level. I’ve often felt addicted to anorexia and bulimia, strangely happy with the havoc they wreak on my body, hesitant to lay them aside and ‘grow.’ The strangest part of it is that I’m a feminist and support a woman’s control over her body and reject male-driven beauty norms. But still, I fight to shrink, to disappear. Then one day, a new therapist who I went to see when there was nothing left to do but die told me something that seemed to throw everything into reverse. She said, ‘You deserve to take up space in the world.’ That same week, I started graduate school and work on my first book of poems. I have grown—in every sense—but the desire is always there waiting.” (website)

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November 15, 2016

Katie Bickham

VILLANELLE FOR AMERICA 2016

The American machine is far from broken,
but grinding bones the way it was designed.
No quiet now will hush the thing we’ve woken.

We try to pray, to pledge, to scream, but choke in
terror of the ledge we teeter on. Resigned,
we whisper low, America the Broken

come crown thy good with thorns, an oaken
anthem like a cage. We have been blind
and deaf to this red thing we’ve woken.

Wake up. While you were sleeping, hate has spoken
its own name and named us too, in kind.
The American machine is well-oiled, broken

in by centuries of bigots armed and cloaked in
stars and stripes. The flag sags in the wind,
rung out and hung to dry by what we’ve woken.

I voted today, protected what I could. The token
clanged in the machine. The man standing behind
me would undo it. Send your tired, your broken
somewhere else. Tell them to run from what we’ve woken.

Poets Respond
November 15, 2016

[download audio]

__________

Katie Bickham: “One of the reactions that has been the most galling to me regarding the election is shock. People are saying that our system is broken for a man like Donald Trump to be president. But the truth is, the system is working exactly as it was designed to, protecting the kinds of people who built it.” (website)

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