"Autobiography of Joan of Arc" by Kaleigh O'Keefe

Kaleigh O’Keefe is a gender outlaw and proud union member living in Dorchester, Massachusetts. Their poetry has appeared in “Breaking the Chains: a Socialist Perspective on Women’s Liberation,” Slamfind, and on indie music legend Ceschi’s album Sans Soleil. Kaleigh writes and edits for Liberation News, is a co-founder of Game Over Books, and hosts the First Fridays Youth Open Mic in Jamaica Plain. You can find them at www.kaleighokeefe.com.

---

AUTOBIOGRAPHY OF JOAN OF ARC
after Ansel Elkins

“...and since you are fallen again -- O, sorrow! -- into these errors and crimes as the dog returns to his vomit…. we denounce you as a rotten member, which, so that you shall not infect the other members of Christ, must be cast out of the unity of the Church, cut off from her body, and given over to the secular power: we cast you off, separate and abandon you…”

- The Trial of Jeanne D’Arc, translated into English from the original Latin and French
Documents by W.P. Barrett. Chapter 33: May 30, the Last Day of This Trial, 1431


Let it be known:
it was not merely armor.

Ask the flames
how much those clothes
protected me.

I was extinguished
early, not even offered dignity
to burn fully. The ashes

raked away to display
my womanhood
for all to see.

Nor was I a dog
that returns to his vomit--
unless every peasant

in France also turned
canine at the sight of me.
They reached out

to touch my garments--
that vomit. Only eighteen,
they believed me holy.

In a hundred years
had never seen anything
so liberating as me.

Look at me. Touch me.
Can you feel
the power of not being

what you are told to be?