On Monday, I posted on Facebook three Padaung women, their necks so stretched by brass rings they look like snakes. But this is an illusion: the weight of the metal pushes their collar bones down, collapsing their rib cages, slowly suffocating them while making their necks look long and keeping them safe from tigers. My younger sister texted to ask if she could be the woman with the lapis lazuli earrings and the green eyes.
On Tuesday, I felt hungry, angry, as if I still menstruated, so I posted the three Furies: Alecto and Magaera and Tisiphone, sisters born from their father’s lopped off cock and tossed into the Aegean Sea. Translated, their names mean: unceasing and grudging and vengeful destruction. Because I am a drunk I know that trios only work as a single unit.
I slept and when I woke I read some of Jean Valentine’s poems. I read about suffering and how God stopped talking to man somewhere in the middle of the Old Testament (such patience was all a lesson in the cosmic mute button.) Wednesday, I posted Job’s daughters, Cinnamon and Eyeshadow and Dove, dead in the rutted fields.
Thursday, Goneril, Reagan, Cordelia watching their father blinded.
My older sister in-boxed me with pictures of hair: should she dye hers back to its original color, brown-almost-black? Three hanks of hair, one charcoal one onyx one wing-tipped foil blonde. I was thinking of how hair changes, depending on the age or the season or the continent. Thus, Friday went to either three Valkyries or three nuns chased by Cerebus or an old scanned Polaroid we had to shake to dry: my mother sitting on the red velvet Queen Anne’s chair, my sister and I on either side, and the baby on her lap. Our eyes black as the jumpsuit of an assassin.
Some burkas and habits are a shade of blue indescribable–is it the sky on a clear autumn day or the ocean after a jellyfish scare or a mirage? That’s the color the three hidden women I posted on Saturday wore–even the mesh over their eyes was this blue, even their kidskin gloves holding big round loaves of bread and leather-bound books.
Sunday, and I posted on Facebook Russ Meyer’s killer pussies: Lori and Tura and Haji, all noir even in broad daylight, hot wrestler assassins under the sun of the Mojave, sweat stained sheer blouses knotted just below their breastbones.
(I think my father, if he has me and my two sisters on his friend list, would get this joke now that he’s dead and plugged in.)
Alyss 