Mardi Gras Series #4, Pastel, by John Cummings
God Was on Trial in 1971
For Jo K
I cut school to visit the Manson girls
on a Los Angeles sidewalk outside the court
where their god was on trial.
Squeaky Fromme shouted “You can do it!”
as I trudged up the steep street towards the girls.
I joined them on the ground, sat seiza,
hands palm up in my lap for hours,
high on the stark beauty of their shaved heads
grouped like pale planets in orbit
around the wide eyes of an awestruck
fifteen-year-old girl.
They had X-ed themselves out of society,
carved the proof between their eyes.
I wanted to carve my forehead.
I wore my bloody X on the inside.
I kept a matchstick one of the girls
dropped in the street.
____________________
Kathryn de Leon
Review by Cedar Koons
The story of brutal murders and “horny teenagers” (Thomas Pynchon) still shocks us. On the street outside the Los Angeles Hall of Justice where the “Manson girls” waited for Charlie, their god, to be convicted, the poem’s speaker, truant from school, trudges uphill to join them and “sat seiza,/hands palm up in my lap for hours.” The poet captures a moment we helplessly rubberneck like we would a terrible car crash. The shaved heads of the speaker’s new family, the x’s they carved on their foreheads as evidence of their wounded minds, and the lost girl come to join them in a kind of hellish devotion titillate and disgust us. The speaker tells us she has a bloody x inside. We know this, just as we know the dismal fate of these “girls” who have thrown away their lives on a psychopath they served and adored. It seems we must relive it repeatedly, but this poem brings a chilling freshness.
Review by Jared Pearce
This poem really drives with its stark images that pile to the weird twists of adoration, devotion, and how often look to our cultural icons, whether they be righteous or otherwise—and maybe especially the otherwise.
Review by Nathan E. Lewis
This story is etched in many of our memories. By placing herself on the sidewalk with the girls, Kathryn de Leon captures how personally we were impacted by the Manson Family. At the same time de Leon masterfully paints the distance between those, who had skin in the game and those of us, who followed or resonated to the story. It’s one thing to sympathize, even empathize, to understand, even support. It’s quite another to believe and identify with displays of solidarity to the depth of worship.
Review by Massimo Fantuzzi
We’re on the middle floor where the darkness / We bury is equal to the lightness we intend. / To be divided is to be multiplied. Our sermon / Today sets the beauty of sin against the purity of dirt. (From Terrance Hayes, American Sonnet For My Past and Future Assassin)
From one cult to another, from one rejection of rationality to another, the temptation is strong, and so very strong is this testimony. It is God (intended as a creation of ours) to go on trial, our service and servitude towards him, our need for building walls, to call them prisons, gardens, catacombs, it is the chain that as self-proclaimed servants we offer to our master. It’s 1971 and still, in 2025, that same collective hallucination and loss of individual judgment, that same blinding hunger for answers. The jury will have to establish how much we, the victims, were in fact the instigators of this most awful crime, creating a God, and going for the worst possible punishment: being kicked out of the cave that Plato described in his Republic, and having all our fake concepts, all our crippled, shrunken senses shattered by reality. Tear down the wall, Roger Waters.
Review by J. S. Absher
I had to review the Manson case to understand the poem. With that understanding, I can see the poem wastes no words.
The Manson “girls” were thrown out of the courtroom for disrupting Manson’s trial. They shaved their heads, and imitated Manson by carving X’s into their foreheads. They had been “X’d” out of the trial and they wished to indicate their separation from a corrupt society. For months, they gathered on a street corner near the trial, attracting the attention of journalists and becoming a draw for tourists and, the poem suggests, disciples. The speaker here becomes implicitly a follower, sitting in a kneeling position (seiza) to show respect; for her, the “bloody X” of separation is internal.
I don’t know if the X’s were meant by the Family to reflect or parody the cross of ash placed on the forehead on Ash Wednesday, where it was a sign of repentance. The title of the poem with its double application suggests it may be. The Manson X was a sign of rebellion and (I think) moral superiority. Manson later turned his X into a swastika.
The dropped matchstick may refer to a fire that almost killed a follower who had left the Family. The Family was suspected of arson, but the investigation was inconclusive. The image suggests in a deeply understated way the power of Manson over his followers and the fearful consequences of falling away.