Matriarch by Lottie Wade

The linen needs folding, the floors swept, the chickens checked and eggs collected.

Pick the corn, pull the cabbage, pop the peas out of their shell.

Pull up the taters, nip the eyes. 

Avert eyes from - 

Be a good wife.

The beds need airing, coffee needs brewing 

Oh, this life 

My knees are stiff - my finger bones crack like kindling. 

But -

Don’t stay still.

There is work to be done. Since I can’t provide him with sons. 

This room, this porch, this corner of heaven 

Is pinned to the sky. An angel crying. 

He speaks of God to me like I don’t know him.

That I haven’t had the Lord almighty visit me since I was a child. 

He wouldn’t believe me anyhow. He views me untamed and wild. 

I view him as the deceiver, devout unbeliever. Anti-Christ in Christ’s clothing. 

But -

Be a good wife. 

For God told me, in the dark, ear in the pillow 

“His lungs will take him, and soon you will walk into a lover’s arms.”

I fear my own making. Yearning and reaching and touching. 

I fear I will have a hand in my husband’s unmaking. 

For I am a red right hand of God, 

And, soon if I could, I would squeeze that man’s heart 

Popped like a seed from a cherry. 

Lottie Wade is a writer of historical queer horror, with a focus on the eerie and atmospheric. Her work has been published by Southern Mule School for Southern Literature and Things as They Aren't Magazine. She lives in Raleigh, NC.