Stina French
February 2022
Stina French is a college instructor and performer who specializes in vulnerable and graphic representations of sexuality, repression, and the healing process. She writes erotic mystery, magic-realist flash memoir, and poetry. She’s featured in many Colorado venues, and her work has appeared in Jen Pastiloff's Manifest Station, Heavy Feather Review, South Broadway Ghost Society, Punch Drunk Press, among others. She leads monthly generative writing workshops and hosts the event, "listen to your skin: an erotic open-mic series" (last Sunday of each month). She wears welts from the Bible Belt, and is currently editing Take The Fruit, Flood The Desert: A Religious Trauma Abuse Anthology. She's working on a manuscript, Also Arc, Also Offering, a Southern-queerdo memoir. Find her on IG at @sister_rainbow_scream or visit her website, sisterrainbowscream.com.
YOU CARVE CHANNELS
You look at the edges of a patch of eczema. This patch is on your elbow. You are sitting in the classroom. Slipping sleeve up. The picking is happening without your noticing. You use the corner of a fingernail to lift the flakes. Under the rim. Remove them. Like this can heal you. Like they won’t be back. Like it won’t bleed. It pops off. Or it clings and takes live skin with it, a little red line, leading to the dead zone. It will become dead now, too. It’s hard to stop the deading.
It’s just you and this opening. You and this tidying up. Until you hear a classmate snicker. Shame is many times your own weight. It crawls on your neck, your back. You shove the sleeve down. Try not to cry. You fail. Try to dry up. You pray that God will cure your skin. You don’t want to be this transparently deciduous. You vow you’ll never pick at yourself again.
You look at the edges of a patch of eczema. This patch is on your finger. You are sitting in the cafeteria. You look at the edges of the wound. An angry little mouth, a crack in the side of your pointer-finger joint. It hurts to write, hardened flesh pulling at the too-new. A valley. You catch its edge and lift. Like this can heal you. Like it won’t be back. Like it’s not bleeding. It comes free. Or it clings and takes live skin with it. It will become dead now, too. It’s hard to remove a wound without making a bigger wound. Your notebook is dotted with tiny red rorschachs. You vow to never pick at yourself again.
You look at the edges of a patch of eczema. This one is on your knee. You are sitting in the bathroom after school. When you lift the edge of one of the scales, the whole area comes off, all at once, and it’s bloody. For a moment it looks like an honest kid injury. Just a fall off a bike. You promise never to pick at yourself again.
You stare at your face in the mirror. You’re crying. You’re sad about the picking but you’re also teaching yourself to cry just so. Different kinds of cries. You want to make an art out of crying. The water as it leaves you, it carves channels. When you scratch your own face, under the eyes where the tears are streaming, you don’t know if you’re doing it as part of the act. You are lost in the act. It wears grooves into you, this artful pain.
SHE SPEAKS WITH WASPS
I. What The Girl Said After She Grew Up
They thought you were dancing
when you were two
when the yellowjackets
swarmed you
when they were eating each other
inside the trap of marriage
like angry wasps in a log
drug across a yard cluttered
with too many pieces of dead wood
not enough flowers
dad's affairs
mother's failure to have an orgasm.
You tried to pile them in whatever order
a toddler could muster
and out they came
The wasps
not your parents
who were watching from the window
in one of their last shared moments
that wasn't a fight--a sort of gift you gave them
In return for your life–
a sort of gift they gave you, you guess:
a show you put on
No one was coming to collect you
No one to put you back in
You’ve crawled into so many traps
of your own making
wanting to feel nails pull stingers
rub meat tenderizer and tobacco chaw
onto the screech of your skin
The louder the pain sings
put a beat to it
Dance harder
Let everyone go on thinking
you've got this
Say, "it's harder for them to hit you
when you're dancing," but no
really, it's not
No one’s watching
No one will save you
but dance anyway
Dance anyway
II. What The Wasps Said To The Girl Who’s Still In There
We fear you will come and drag us away again
if we buzz too much
if we allow ourselves to want
to break your skin
There was no way we could stay
hidden in the woodpile forever
Your small arms were stronger than they should have been
and you didn't give up
where another girl might have
But listen, we have a right to be here
We had to let you know that
We left you alive
And now: we are the Girlkeeper!
You don't have to hide to be held
We got you
(but hide if you want to)
You don't have to dance to be seen
We see you
(but dance if you want to)
Let us make your skin holy
(listen to your skin)
Let us make something we can live inside
(this poem on this paper:
what you chewed
and spit out to soothe)
We, too, know something
of Poetry
We also regurgitate our homes
But you keep forgetting we ain’t bees
We don’t do a cute waggle dance
to navigate flowers
We dance to breathe
There is no royal jelly
made out of flower cum
in the bees’ guts
There is no honey in this poem
We chew our victims to paste
and feed them to our young
we lick digestive secretions off them to survive
We are not pretty
We are carnivorous
like you
We are family
We are all going to die
When we get caught in traps, listen–
sometimes, we eat each other in there
Sometimes, we help each other out
but none of us makes it out of here alive
You are tender meat
but you are not a trap
It’s not your job to clear the traps.
Listen to your skin:
when it stings like that
when no one is there to stop the stinging:
sing over the sting.
When you need hiving
we will follow
But kindly stop flipping
every goddamn log in the yard
like somebody’s paying you
to organize the forest
Girl:
we give you permission
to swarm