War Supply

Abstract

War Supply Ina Cariño (bio) there are different ways to say my name: scar tissue. pariah. starling, wings clipped. there were plenty of us— didn’t go by choice— I still feel sick when I come close to a man, even when it’s my husband. I am called grandmother. I am called blank look. shadow woman. blemished fruit, wizened. they beat us, they sometimes used condoms— & often washed between men. in certain textbooks they say we wanted to be prostitutes, they say the government wanted to prevent rape in the first place. virgins to stave off venereal disease. last year I finally asked to be paid. they gave me a modest sum. but I am ashamed I walk with a limp. my child’s true father could be anyone— could now be a family man. & I am as muddy stream. all sullied behind a smile. o I want to be an eager finch again— to unfurl wings in rising flock. flurry of flight, sister untamed. I still remember the day I walked warm under sun among red fern fronds, watching the reed-grass ripple, hibiscus sticky under palms— before they caught me by the waist. before I stopped being a woman. Ina Cariño INA CARIÑO is a 2022 Whiting Award winner with an MFA in creative writing from North Carolina State University. Their poetry appears or is forthcoming in The American Poetry Review, The Margins, Guernica, Poetry Northwest, Poetry Magazine, Paris Review Daily, Waxwing, New England Review, and elsewhere. She is a Kundiman fellow and is the winner of the 2021 Alice James Award for Feast, forthcoming from Alice James Books in March 2023. In 2021, Ina was selected as one of four winners of the 92Y Discovery Poetry Contest. Copyright © 2023 Center for the Study of the American South Indexed in Humanities International Complete