A Letter to Mata Hari, dead at 41 by Cierra Lowe

I can envision your pilot,
roiling within his apartment that
mourning—despicably
frying eggs and renouncing
your conception. As if
your essence was merely insult
to his injury.

I bet you were born on Rosh Hashanah.
I bet you used a rib as a hatpin.
I bet that those twelve barrels seemed a curious affection
as they peered upon you—they say you
blew a kiss to the
firing squad.

You were then deafened by God’s silence.
It was French bullets that made love to
your body for the last time.

They say you wore white gloves.
They say you kept your face to the sky.

Blood wept from your abdomen,
and still-blind gathered around its
mother. Undancing legs
curled beneath you like an impossible
chair as you birthed your first
Rorschach test. To France,
it looked like moral ambiguity.
To General Nicolai, it looked like
a breech of contract.
To your creator, it looked like
spilled ink.

# # #

Cierra Lowe is a poet and half-assed artist living in St. Louis, Missouri. She graduated from Webster University with a BA in philosophy, and her poems have been featured in Bad Jacket, Bellerive, and Sheila-Na-Gig. She published her first full-length collection of poetry and prose, The Horse and the Water, in 2017, and is currently working on her second as she pursues her BSN at UMSL. You can find new poems and other ramblings on her website www.cierralovesyou.com.

Photo: Ender Vatan