Passenger
Summer Night (1890) by Winslow Homer
By Chloe Biggs
You have heard it said
that crews aboard ships providing passage to women
incur the wrath of the gods.
No one knows for certain
whether divine beings are angered
by the mere presence of a female passenger,
or by what the men aboard may be driven to do
when the journey becomes long
and the moral compass becomes more difficult to read
than the astronomer’s constellation or the cartographer’s ink.
On the rare occasion that some men have been moved
to turn towards the elderly widow,
the small girl clutching a faceless doll,
the penniless young woman (with hair like the skin of an apple
and skin as soft and pale as what will be revealed
if they take a bite),
they needed only to remember that the remedy
for sudden waves as tall as trees
and lightning that turns the pitch sky to daylight
is to make an offering of the woman
deemed most likely to be responsible for the heavenly upset.
And they are holy
for delighting in the many ways
they may give her body to the sea,
for gods
like men
are murderous.
But from their dry decks
they have never bothered to see
The salt water pouring into her mouth and
crystallizing the chords in her throat
into jagged garnet and obsidian,
Her lungs and heart crushing
into somethings that can survive
the Cold Deep Dark,
The ropes binding her ankles together
eventually cutting so deeply
that her legs fuse into a single limb
Her metamorphosis
from benign to malignant.
They have forgotten their own rule:
You cannot drown a witch.
She is ordained with new prowess:
the alluring huntress
collecting skulls of men who pass
and cannot resist
dashing their ships upon her cave
to the coo of her otherworldly melodies.
But what is to become of the Good Women
who walk with their heads and eyes down
and lower their voices to make room
for the men who will purchase them from their fathers?
Their fate is grimmer still.
Fortune can only be squeezed
from a woman aboard a ship
in the form of a carved wooden masthead.
She need not a mind, a voice, or legs
when she is turned to wood and displayed proudly on the bow—
beautiful, quiet, bare-chested.
The Good Women they asked for will all be rendered inanimate,
their flawless wooden skin a perfect scratching post
on which their dangerous sisters
may sharpen their bestial claws.
No matter how much milk they may warm on stoves,
how many sheep they may number for leaping,
how loudly their prayers may echo in the ether,
May they never find sleep
for these are the versions of us that they have created.
Chloe Biggs received her MFA in Creative Writing from Fairleigh Dickinson University, where she also served as the Editorial Assistant in poetry for The Literary Review. She is essentially an overgrown theater kid who loves reading gothic literature and mythology, coloring, and celebrating Halloween 365 days per year.