Floating Rudderless in Ash

Arizona State Hospital 

Aldonza was 15

Quinceanera ready

during that economic Pompeii disaster known as the Great Depression

Rudderless.  Ashes, ashes, we all fall down.

Mom, a petite beauty with marcel waved jet black hair, sometimes tinted henna red

Mom with dark red bee stung lips and powder

didn’t want to bother

with a child anymore.

Aldonza can take care of herself.

Seeking a helmsman, Aldonza found him

Married him at age 15

Her life another song of perfidious lovers and spouses

that she heard on her mother’s phonograph as a little girl

She eventually tired  of the tunes

Tired of slogging through ashes

And when he sauntered home after a long absence...

In a fit of rage

she tore off every stitch of clothing he had on him

and locked him out, standing in the hallway, 

bewildered, bloody and naked.

She was put away

dragged handcuffed into the bald light

Growing  under the florescent light

A light that bathes everyone in a greenish hue 

While locked in with the criminally insane, she met Winnie Ruth Judd

The Tiger Woman, accused murderer of two other women

Whose dismembered bodies turned up in a trunk that oozed,

if that trunk hadn’t oozed.

Thorazine did nothing to cure Aldonza's umbrage

Neither did the lobotomy

which left her with swimming eyes

soft, dark swimming eyes

but meaner than ever. 

Reached through a doctor’s trousers once

clamped her fingers around his balls

and led him around his office

he tripping gingerly behind her, and shouting for the orderlies

Knocked out a nurse's front tooth

In the mid-sixties, with a pale gesture of apology

Aldonza was released.

She returned to her mother, who was now a decimated  barfly

Her beauty still vaguely evident through her leathery features 

her shoulder length hair now two toned,  rolled in the front,

In a deflated 1940’s bouffant.  Still ready for the evening.