Lisa Montgomery was born with permanent brain damage from her mother’s alcoholism while pregnant, was repeatedly raped and beaten by her stepfather and his friends, tortured and trafficked by her mother, and entered into a violent and sexually abusive marriage with her stepbrother (at the encouragement of her mother) at age 18. She suffered from Complex PTSD as a result of these repeated traumas. Prior to her death, Lisa was held in solitary confinement and severely dissociated at the time of her execution, which was one week before Trump left office.
Sister
Who is she but a Heaven-sent companion?
What but a little mother or little daughter, one or the other?
What is this creature but loose gloss on water or ice-etched burden? What is
glistening breath of bedtime confessions? What are hand-
prints on Plexiglas partitions? What is cry and listen and guilt
and powerlessness facing powerlessness, two dainty halves of a locket,
deranged mirror or partial litter cantering down the same
horrible corridor? Who cuts down brush for the play-pretend house?
Who is the mother or daughter this round?
Dollhouse
So much like a poem, isn’t it? From the poorest materials
and time and impulse begets the knit walls, the three stories,
the figure at the center, sitting on a bed. This is one
version of what could have been. This is revision, a gift to the left-
behind children, soon motherless, saying I labored,
I pleasured, I learned within this structure and found a peace
not known outside the pearl and stitch, this concentration, every
technique in service of the whole. Let the little home she made before
she went endure, as her final rest, a monument. The looming
end is not in it. Nor fear’s wick, nor its extinguishment.
No
When the curtains swung, when she found herself
lain back again, pinned, with strangers taking her in, there was
a pause between the asking and the answer akin to the air
between the hammer and the nail. That steely
word outlawed at home, what sentence could have held her
better? What poem could have illumed the soul?
The mouth finds its first suckling shape as she gazes up
at a speck in the fluorescents, a buzz, some feminine voice
at her shoulder asking the question gently before she gives her
No, the nothing after flickering in the echo.
Paula Bohince is the author of three poetry collections, most recently Swallows and Waves.
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