Sport 43: 2015
Sugar Magnolia Wilson — Anne Boleyn
Sugar Magnolia Wilson
Anne Boleyn
Anne Boleyn had reptilian creatures
dwelling in her ovaries eating
all her eggs.
Henry’s sperm, dumb and excited,
would swim in and chomp chomp,
be devoured in seconds, like a
16th-century version of Fear Factor
in which none of the contenders are
scared of anything at all,
even eating their partner’s babies
or chopping off their concubine’s
extremities.
She would have chewed the top
off Mary’s head
would have gnawed right through
the skull and, if straws had
been invented, sipped
the welling blood till only
the brain was left—an ice-cream
ball at the bottom of a berry
sundae.
Then time for the
razor-edged spoon, used
with the luciferic skill of the
sixth finger.
Anne stood in the corners
of rooms hung with velvet—
the plush right angles
a private screen on which
her mind could blossom
darkly outward
with her clever back to men—gasping
anemones left high and dry without
the pandering feminine waters
anywhere around.
There would be no
mollification.
Her back, a straight and
soundless bell chiming its
judgement,
premeditated and
whip-raw with disrespect.
She had the claw marks of
past lives—
the mauling scars of
cold blooded marauding.
She came out of the
primordial swamp straight into
the mind of humanity,
learned like lightning,
laced her speech with the
stenchless worm of arsenic,
its small and ruthless mouth
attaching to the most tender
place in men and women.
The proof: Catherine’s heart—a
hoar-frosted garden, small teeth marks
across its surface, the roots of
anger finally withered and dry.
Anne glimmered coolly—
a magnificent ice-axe,
cleaving the earth’s breast.
Her shoes the shape of
inbred alligators
squashed the weakest fruit to
rot beneath the pale English sun.