THE MARTYR

THE MARTYR

Southern Girl Sicko

I’m living in Virginia, 

the beginning of the south,

the childstar of the confederacy.


I’m putting worms and swampwater into buckets

and dumping them on the heads of 

northern boys who know mud as well as they know space.


I’ve mowed the king down with my horse,

his legs are morbid and twisted like L-shaped pipes

as he moans in the dark while I hop off the saddle.


My feet are bare and covered in gravel,

my dress is falling off my shoulders,

exposing a breast as I kick the ruler,


nothing but a man when his crown falls down the ravine.


He weeps harder as I remove my 

spear from its sheath.

I step on his chest, 

hundreds of pebbles covered in my dead skin,

scratching him through his shirt.


I hold the spear above my head 

as if I am splitting a log. 

I yell at the man I toppled over,

“Thus always to tyrants.”

Drooping,

Wilting

It all ran down my face—

the cuts were vertical and 

the drops of my embarrassed eyes

wetting themselves

hit the pavement heels first.

It stressed me out to not know

what I would become but knowing

I would transform and feel the searing pain

of new roots bursting out of my back,

having new blood that 

came to be by swirling around my brain.

I was a girl turning on my axis

with a disturbance

from my revolution

that rivaled the smooth engineering 

of Earth’s legs.

I was becoming a girl

who would feel ill forever—

the type of girl who 

could only wipe at the throb 

when it wept,

paint it in thick white cream when it 

began to turn red 

until I lost control and

clawed at my burning surface

until I broke the seal.

With the scrape of my bulldozing nails,

I began to feel something eternal.

The Martyr is Celia Rose’s first full-length poetry manuscript. The Martyr is a collection of social horror poems with experimental narrative expression and form inspired by Audre Lorde’s self-created genre, biomythography, and Catholic legends of martyrdom. The narrative poetic collection is expressed through the voice of a young Black woman navigating a violently unforgiving contemporary America she refuses to suffer in. The Martyr weaves together numerous textual and literary forms, themes, and expressions such as prose poems, body horror, and surrealism amongst other rich elements. The Martyr was written, edited, revised, and workshopped under the supervision of Poet, Associate Professor, and Writing Chair of Literary Studies, Jennifer Firestone as a 2023 senior capstone project for the Poetry concentration of the Literary Studies program at Eugene Lang College of Liberal Arts. The Martyr was selected for and presented at the poster session of Eugene Lang College’s 2023 Dean’s Honor Symposium. “Southern Girl Sicko” and “Drooping, Wilting” are both excerpts from The Martyr; more poems from The Martyr can be read on Rose’s poetry page.

Next

Sacred/Profane