Dear Creature by Jessica Cuello

Dear Creature,

After everyone forgot the summer without a summer
I still had the ice indelible

and your parceled face
shifting in visible heat.

I was making sentences for dear life.
And also money. I would know

its particular insecurity
my whole life.

P. was part of making.
But he would not

abandon Claire
when Byron took her child.

 I could have left her
behind. I was both

cruelty and lair,
nursemaid and envy.

I could sketch out life
or snuff its current.

She had a named child.

Your monstrous maker,

M.S.

P.S. P. ran from our infant born early.

§

Dear Creature,

The sea of ice
was my favorite distraction.

We kept a squirrel
inside a box who bit me.

P. carried him for awhile
the way he carried kindness,

useless & external,
like a man. At night

when we read “Christabel”
P. thought my nipples

were eyes. He ran away—
afraid. I suppose each hole

of my body is an eye.
Especially my mouth—

repulsed by the heat
of its need.

Your monstrous creator,

M.S.

Note: Mary Shelley fell in love with poet Percy Bysshe Shelley at age 16, and against her father’s wishes, fled with him to France. Her step-sister Claire came with them and remained with them for the entirety of their relationship. Claire had a child with Byron and possibly a child with Shelley as well. Three of Mary Shelley’s children died. Creature is a reference to Frankenstein’s monster, the  novel Mary Shelley began in Switzerland while in the company of Shelley, Byron, and her step-sister. During one poetry reading, Shelley became frightened by her and ran from the room.

Jessica Cuello is the author of Hunt (The Word Works, 2017) and Pricking (Tiger Bark Press, 2016). She has been awarded The 2017 CNY Book Award, The 2016 Washington Prize, The New Letters Poetry Prize, a Saltonstall Fellowship, and most recently, The New Ohio Review Poetry Prize.