Rikki Santer

          Packing with Lilith

Parked under a streetlight, Lilith finishes
her Lucky and tosses its butt out the window
of her oxblood Buick Riviera.
Her mindstage is seismic, the buzzing edge
of her looking deliciously full of herself.
What I’m saying is she doesn’t care
if we think of her or not.
We walk arm in arm, our cobalt tresses
abundant and a Zig-Zagged joint between us,
feral in our adolescent Eden.

We wonder if she’s been watching for us. 
Tonight we could be her hand-me-down
legends, another crop of invasive species.
Her spiked-heeled potions lace our nostrils,
her snake print coils around our torsos.
We began as obscure girls pranking
boots and mittens in school cloakrooms,
then graduated to sipping the sweet burn
of peppermint schnapps behind the strip mall.
In our matrix of imagined power,
we taunt a homeroom’s teenaged mother
or post another night’s rendezvous
with those sophomore guys at 7-Eleven,
rowdy hook and snag of zippers.

O, Lilith,  ghost of patriarchal fear,
first sister icon reclaimed by these sisters,
we imagine you straddling rabbis
of Talmud and Midrash while wedging
fish hooks into their quivering tongues.

Our voices trill like screech owls,
we are punk rock goddesses
dancing around a bonfire, clitorises
blooming in moonlight.
Not quite fiends, we like that judgment
will follow us home. But Lilith doesn't
see our waving as she tosses
three Macy’s shopping bags
onto her front seat and lays down
the rubber like nobody’s business.

In 2023, Rikki Santer was named Ohio Poet of the Year. Her twelfth and most recent poetry collection, Resurrection Letter: Leonora, Her Tarot, and Me, is a sequence in tribute to the surrealist artist Leonora Carrington. Please contact her through her website, https://rikkisanter.com.