Global Lovers
Rhonda Pettit
The Global Lover
I am the Queen of Economies.
I have three mouths.
They are always
open, silent, and for rent.
I do not know what I am worth,
but tied down, tortured, raped,
yet kept alive, I must be
invaluable. For more details,
see the man inside.
United Nations Bodies
I mostly stay here, but my cunt
has traveled the world
on pricks from
England, Europe,
America North and South,
Asia, Australia,
Africa North and South.
I cannot say no
in every language,
but all the ones, all one color
to me say yes yes yes
yes yes yes yes
yes – how narrow
my world view would be
were it not for cunning, currency
exchange, a globe ripe
for slicing
and flesh
that never stops
healing.
Global Hunger
A tulip, eaten by insects,
ceases to be a flower,
becoming food.
What kind of death
has its mouth on me
in this house
of revolving men?
What nutrient of mine
is needed to keep it
alive and always
hungry?
Déjà vu
I remember too much.
One day, one
came
into my room too fast
and I said,
No,
I just got finished with you,
and he said,
No,
and then the next one
was the same
one too
and he said, No cunt
and I said,
Yes,
that's what I mean, then
the next one
came,
the same discussion, denial
and why if I
can see
the truth, the lie, the repetition,
the one cannot:
We
have all been here before.
Say it, say it,
say it,
and he stops and looks
and says to me,
Say what?
Nursery
One time one of them
calls me Momma.
One time one of them
calls me Baby.
Me is my momma,
my baby, my body
silently singing
while :
Rock-a-bye body,
gone from the heart.
What lies here beating
is taking no part.
Rock-a-bye body,
murder the gun
buying the privilege
to shoot on the run.
Rock-a-bye body,
dream of white sails
though sleep comes hard
on this bed of nails.
Rock-a-bye body.
If you awake,
this heaven will keep you
for others to make.
Glossary
Mine = the name given to the victimized prostitute by the pimp
The Man Inside = the pimp or brothel owner
The Ones = her customers
While = the sex act, or period in which she is having sex with customers or
the pimp
working notes
One Sunday I read another in a series of columns by New York Times reporter Nicholas D. Kristof about sex trafficking in our new global economy. This particular story concerned Aisha Parveen, a 14-year-old Pakistani girl abducted on her way to school and taken to a brothel 200 miles south of her home. She was forced via beatings, rape, torture, threats, and psychological abuse to work as a prostitute for the next seven years. She was one of the lucky ones – she managed to escape – but there are millions more like her who never escape, who die from AIDS or other diseases, who wake into this nightmare at a much younger age than did Aisha. I could not get this story, its pure horror, out of my mind. I doubted if I could survive such an encounter and wondered how Aisha and others like her did. What did they think and feel on a day-to-day basis? What was their sense of the world? How did this – and they – change over time? Soon I was obsessed by a voice that wanted to explore these issues – not Aisha's voice, but an imagined, more representative one inspired by Aisha. For almost two months, I could write of nothing else. What I initially thought might be a sequence now looks to be a book-length manuscript I have titled The Global Lovers.
about the author
Rhonda Pettit is an associate professor of English and Women's Studies at University of Cincinnati Raymond Walters College, where she teaches creative writing, literature, and composition. Her books include A Gendered Collision: Sentimentalism and Modernism in Dorothy Parker's Poetry and Fiction (Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 2000), The Critical Waltz: Essays on the Work of Dorothy Parker (Fairleigh Dickinson UP, 2005), and Joy Harjo (Boise State University Western Writers Series, 1998). She is also co-editor of poetry for the Aunt Lute Anthology of U. S. Women Writers, Vol. I (Lisa Maria Hogeland and Mary Klages, general editors, Aunt Lute Books, 2004), and has published articles about the poetry of Adrienne Rich, Eavan Boland, Seamus Heaney, and others. Her own poems have appeared in literary journals and an anthology of Kentucky writers, Through the Gap.
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