Description
Winner of the Fall 2023 Black River Chapbook Competition
Meghann Plunkett’s debut chapbook, What We Did To Her Made The Water Rise, explores the cross section between shoreline and the female form. This collection is set in the decay of the New England gothic aesthetic where the slow disintegration of an ocean-side community illuminates the ways women are worn down under traditional gender roles. A journey of intergenerational hardship is echoed throughout the stark oceanic imagery and a fraught mother and daughter dynamic. Plunkett’s broken structure and sound blurs the line between body and land, highlighting the similarities between earth erosion and the erosion of the female experience.
NIGHTSHADE
for Amy
She called me the morning after–
hair brambled into a nest, her eyes
an upshot of so-what–to tell me
that after bottles clinked out of his father’s
liquor cabinet, they fucked in every
room. And she broke open forgetting
to count the days of her cycle. Her hips
a burst of red snarl all over the house.
The sofa, the kitchen, his parents’
bedroom: a trophy of defiance they grinned
through as she puddled, unaware of the blood
anchoring out of her. And when the sun rose
he called her bitch for the stains on his mother’s
linens. Teardrop shapes sloping from where
she was bent over the armchair. Thick
fingerprints purpling on the counter. She called me
and I appeared there in this instance of morning,
arms heavy with jugs of cleaning agent.
She led me to the deepest mark of her, a nightshade,
a bodiless heart imprinted on an eggshell
duvet. And it was something ancient,
the way we took a knee and began
to scrub. Grinning into each other, dipping
rags into cups of bleach. Why wouldn’t
this be as natural as saying our own names?
As if we weren’t familiar with this kind of slow
removal. As if we didn’t already know how
to clean ourselves out of the world.
© Joe Velez 
