Cullen Bryant Owens

Suzanne Owens grew up in Toronto, Canada, graduated from the University of Western Ontario and received her MFA in writing from Emerson College in Boston.  She is a graduate of the American Musical and Dramatic Academy in New York and has worked as actress in England, Canada and the United States.
     She won the Frank Cat Press Chapbook Award in 1996 for Theater Poems and has been widely published in literary journals including Ploughshares, Mississippi Review, Nimrod and Ontario Review.
     Her first book, The Daughters of Discordia, is published by BOA Editions, Ltd.  In it, Suzanne Owens gives poetic voice to some of the most infamous, wayward and criminal women in history.  Named for the goddess Discordia, whom Zeus expelled from heaven, the collection includes monologues from such famous daughters as Ma Barker and Cattle Kate, as well as the stories of lesser-known but no less notorious women.
     In the foreword to the book, Denise Duhamel writes, “Hers is a revisionist poetry...  Owens frees these women to sing, some from the grave, and turns point of view on its head.”  Suzanne Owens has developed a one-woman play based on the characters in The Daughters of Discordia.
     She lives and teaches in the Boston area.
 

Samples of the poet’s work:

 
HOMESTEAD CLAIM NO. 2003
 

The lynching of Ella Watson, known as Cattle Kate, in 1889 triggered the Johnson County war between the powerful Wyoming Stock Growers Association and the small independent ranchers.

I was just another cattle rustler, hell
with a six-gun, queen of the branding iron
and lariat. They called me the devil
in the saddle, a terror astride a bronc,

the best little whore in Johnson County.
From the outlaw’s hideout, Hole-in-the-Wall,
they’d drive a stolen heifer over
to my ranch and trade it for a little ass. Vigilantes

danced in the hall, the king of the rustlers
played his fiddle. My herd increased.
I applaud the ones who apply
their own brand. Life is nothing

but a pilfered animal. I took whatever
came my way: a pair of fancy horses,
a silver-studded saddle. We’re here no longer
than the time it takes to hear a six-gun barking,

the groan of a hollow barn, the flap
of bleached slats swinging in the storm.
So, noose my neck to the cottonwood branch.
Watch my knickers kick the air.

A few maverick cattle wind up
in everyone’s corral. Some kind of lariat
is finally tossed. We’re all driven
to the railhead for shipment.

GOD IS A COWBOY WHO RIDES A LAME HORSE
 

Adoniram Burroughs, bookeeper, left Iowa for Washington, D.C., after sexually abusing Mary Harris for five years. Still, he promised to marry her on her eighteenth birthday. Instead, he wed a Washington socialite. When her breach-of-promise suit failed, Harris shot Borroughs in Washington. At the trial in 1865 she was judged insane, and at twenty sentenced to an asylum in Baltimore to recuperate.

Burroughs fondled me in the store’s back room
where I worked with the fancy goods
when I was three cents a day
and nine years old.

Here, in this paper, I read the news
of his wedding. My twitches
feed the carpet berry juices. They say it is
my monthly blood that holds me

on the winter floor nights, my blood
that tears clothes, rips books.
The doctor sees it in my wild eye, my womb
gone mad. I hear its curses in the racketing

of each railway tie all the way to Washington
racing God who loathes me.
My nervous symptoms clutch his love letters
five years, stamped with

“mourning for our stolen kisses.” I lift
my green veils. Shots. Their destination through
the corridors as confident as Sherman’s army
marching to the sea. My four-barrel pistol speaks twice;

Burroughs falls in the hall of the Treasury building—
his eyes, their blue so pale, I can see right through
to his vows to make me “a very seemly wife.”
Mold the tankard, fill it, drink the glistening.

                               ***

My borrowed money; it’s twelve-hour days
that wear bare feet and go hungry; he sinks
whiskeylogged into Miss Boggs, their wedding,
soft Washington society.

Our two bastard babies in the west: the first,
his neck I twisted, a sprig buried in a stall
warming beneath the cow’s belly; the other,
as light as paper money, a rolled wad

in Burroughs’s pocket. The one whose skull
I leaned my elbow on, shoved
into a pit, lies there still pastured
under the sage. A Confederacy surrenders.

Oh, my heart’s lust, my bruised apron,
my weighted pincushion. How they fly.
A bleak cloak and stillborn promises
swathe me in “no guilt.” Veils

never again to be lifted over my head.
Against my breast, my hands crush the flowers
poor Mrs. Lincoln sent. In the crowd of jurors
who acquitted me, little stone hands

wave my carriage on to the depot. No hands
can redress the rents made in the barn’s sweat,
the fermented pasture. Baltimore did not
recuperate my straggling hair, my breached life.

KIM’S STORY
 

North Korean terrorist Kim Hyon Hui placed a bomb on a South Korean Airliner. She was captured and sentenced to death in 1989 by the Seoul government, which later granted her a special pardon for propaganda purposes. She lives in protective custody, always in danger of being assassinated.

One hundred and sixteen blew up
above the Andaman Sea. The bomb
was in the overnight bag I left aboard—
while their bodies were being contorted
by the force of the explosive plummet,
I was trying on new clothes
in the airport’s duty-free shop, turning
this way and that to get a matching
size in the mirror: I thought,
I was free; I thought,

They’ll never catch me now, I’ll never
have to use the cyanide capsule
in the filter of my cigarette,
supplied by my superiors:
that Marlboro memento is still in a pocket,
tucked away with my northern life.

Now I gaze north toward Kwanmo
Mountain, certain it keeps my mother’s tears
in its rivers, those rivers that flow south
into the Yellow Sea. I am
the “Land of the Morning Calm, Korea,”
my borders divided by generations
of crime, centuries of war....

My southern captors trot me out
for propaganda occasions, to lecture
the rebellious students, to tell my story over
and over: How they selected me
in childhood, how I was trained

to obey their evil designs, trained
as a terrorist. Each morning I had to dust
my compound’s painting of Him,
our dictator, our North Korean god.
(I’m trying to forget his name.) How
honored I was to receive His holy mission.
I embraced my special task, the atrocity
bestowed on me like a fortunate
marriage, the bomb whose works I
never did understand, but that was all right;
all I had to do, stow it up there
in the overhead compartment.
My audiences tend to wince at this point.

Repentance rewards: given a new life,
pardoned into protective custody,
kept secure with monthly paychecks
from the Information Ministry, I live
in a ‘‘safe house,’’ a refuge to which
each day they forward my mail:
marriage proposals, death threats,
invitations to tea. Men want me.
I am a Virgin Terrorist.
They dream of me, their eyes flower
like flak, like festival fireworks. But
I am nor a fascination, I am a machine.

They push my buttons, North
and South, both there and here they
turn me this way and that to suit
their doctrines, educating, reeducating,
constructing, patiently correcting my faults.

Former comrade, dutiful party daughter,
now I sit in the interviewee’s
chair, the Seoul TV studio bright and hot
around me, the lights detonating
my eyes. The makeup girl fusses
above me, adjusting the new gold crucifix
at my throat, clipping my hair back
with a pearl, touching up my mouth,
inventing my perfections.

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