[Poem] Water Women

 Water Women

By Katherine Hodge

Hell creeps up on some women

The holiest nuns time past,

Once patient with piety

Now pious patients (a krake)

Decanted limbs on sterile tables, 

Praying for a dry diagnosis

Of her damp ache

Water women

Trapped in tanks

Rot a fish

Slake a cat

Be poisoned by tang

Flushed with the trash

Married to bogs that 

But also the thunderous women, Pacific and Superior of shape

Windy whirling certainty the land need be remade

To salve their ache

Hell a storm they cant, not break

Her militant hail

Her mimsy mud flats

The prison waterbed

The water women in your tap

Beware the meeting of the tides, the battle of two waters come

And beware the damp wet, that creeps in, daughters 

turning land black with molding spiteful chum

Beware:

Her moan of destruction

the ungodly slick births

Waves of lost women

Breakers of God’s spell

We are water women

Shapeless formers of all men

They are water women

Shapeless drips of all hell