Jade Palmer (she/her) is pursuing a BA Honours in English and Creative Writing and a Minor in Sexuality Studies at Concordia University in Tiohti:áke / Montreal. Finding the intersection between these fields is her main academic goal. She currently serves as co-editor-in-chief of Soliloquies Anthology, Concordia’s undergraduate literary journal, and she has previously been published in Beyond Words Literary Magazine.
“This poem responds to the painting Meat and Fish Market (Winter) (1595) by Lucas van Valckenborch. My work explores what events might have transpired after the tense moment captured in the art. This poem also leans on the novel-in-verse Never Mind (2016) by Katherine Lawrence, specifically the work’s archaic yet inventive voice and display of the great lengths to which mothers go to support their families.”
With a wicker basket swinging
December morning church bell in the crook
of her arm, she marched through that back street
right up to the butcher’s stall. Claimed a cut
of lamb with a pale hand’s grip
on the bone. Spoke to him her offer.
Cotton ruff raised his indignant chin.
Lip tight like a lacquered wooden cane
snapped, “three guilders more.”
Her body a bookshelf emptied
by the need for kindling, praised God
with a bountiful table,
so although her eyes reflected piety
in the dull cleaver he wielded,
she now
shifts back on the cobblestones, and swipes
the lamb leg fox-like from his stand.
His shout shakes the icicles from their eaves.
Blade tastes a white lace cuff
for the first time, then familiar tendon.
Left hand left behind searches red river
for her heart, alerts the other marketgoers
with iron in the air, “fresh cut for sale.”
And she screams, steam rising from her
baby bird mouth, saturating day into
the butcher’s impossibly black night,
during which he will rumple his hat
in fitful sleep, wake up damp with a hymn
of repentance on the lips.
But now,
the unlucky fish gaze on, alive
in wooden buckets, and beg
the needle-cold air for the same mercy
of slaughter. They instead
catch snowflakes
in their own gulping mouths.
