Throne Defiance and Other Poems: Jerin Anne Jacob

Throne Defiance

Bring the Persian queen in crown

To strip hersooth fables

Before the Mozartian burlesque

For she was a fair triptych beauty to behold

No.

Vashti says, the proto-goth –

Later to embody an unexplored darkness. 

I decide what happens to my body

Rooting for agency

In a culture that objectified her

Terrifying a king and his men

Controlled by the weakness of hierarchy

She tweets in the morning

Nullifying the history of a bloated paradox 

A woman who loses her throne 

And regains her regality 

Embroiled in undaunted resistance

Throning herself on the annals

Of Herstory.

***

Salting Divinity

How do you best preserve your divinity?

You could imitate Elisha’s miracle, or

Extend the shelf life of your faith by –

Pickle Curing

Here, a person or space is used to hold together your brine of faith which forms over time as the salt of the earthly chaos mixes with the water of our maturing. Middle aged divinities are usually best pickle-cured. A layer of dry essences and experiences is bared open to the person or space which helps hold and salt-foster it well.

Brining

Brining is the process of submerging a raw cut of ourselves into a solution of stories, mythologies, lived experiences, privilege, biases, intersections and politics. It adds flavour, seasoning from the inside out, but it also changes our innards. The salts of the world in brine denatures our macro-lives to allow the faith sensibilities to retain more rationale.

Kench Salting

In kench salting, the beliefs, thoughts and values of a person mix with dry-crude everyday realities and pile up. The faith-brine forms as these alternatively dilute and concentrate convictions from the being are allowed to drain away for better preservation.

Thus take in doses, faith with a pinch of salt – earthly succour. 

How would you?

***

Women Who Loved

“Where you go I will go, and where you stay I will stay. Your people will be my people and your God, my God.” (Ruth 1:16)

Lines that oft solemnise unions don’t tell people

These were originally told by one woman to another

Dabaq

Oh Spirit, 

May we learn to accept that Ruth cleaved to Naomi 

The same way Adam, with Eve.

That oneness deems only a familiarity of comfort, not truth;

This iris halo that weaves around their crowns 

Hosts a lineage of queer stories, questions our ink-parchment 

Their follied orthodox permanence.