Sign Inventory 1, Week 2

Erika Meitner's "Electric Girls"

Translucent letters scatter across the sky
in an air show for tourists:  ladies' night
with two-dollar drafts down the beach--
a gluttonous ad for the stutter of summer lust
or a general message from the deities?
Maybe Mithra the god of light, tied
to the sun; maybe Hathor, the Egyptian
protector of everything feminine.

-- alliteration and assonance ("two-dollar drafts down" and "stutter of summer lust")
-- allusions to the Zoroastrianist figure Mithra and the Egyptian god Hathor

This is missing girl season.  Two more disappear
at gunpoint from cars in Quartz Hill, boyfriends left intact,
bound with duct tape, still parked in lover's lane.
After Amber Alerts flash on every California freeway,
the girls are found by sheriffs' deputies, who shoot
Roy Dean Ratliff on a desolate stretch of road
where he had driven to kill and bury them.

-- first sentence of the stanza changes the tone of the poem
-- "Roy Dean Ratliff" interrupts the stanza's smooth flow

Newscasters first reported the girls were abducted,
but escaped unhurt.  Papers nationwide printed
their names until authorities discovered they were raped
and their identities were immediately erased,
changed to "two teenage girls" or "the victims."

-- first stanza written with verbs in past-tense
-- "until" marks the stanza's turn
-- juxtaposition created between the speaker's use of the word "girls" and the details "two teenage girls" and "the victims"

In the nineteenth century, girls in whose presence
certain phenomena occurred--the movement of objects
without contact, or at a brush from a petticoat:
a compass needle's tremor, the agitation of a cold wind--
were called Electric Girls, could distinguish
between the poles of a magnet at a touch.

-- date specified, unlike the previous stanza, in which the speaker uses past tense but specifies no date
-- the "petticoat" and "cold wind" are set up as the blamed subjects, while "objects" and "compass" are set up as the victimized subjects
-- stanza disrupted and broken into two parts:  before "the movement" and after "cold wind"
-- the middle section is grammatically incorrect (specifically, a comma splice following "contact," a colon following "petticoat," and a second comma splice after "tremor")

The most famous was a Normandy peasant, Angelique Cottin.
Taken to Paris, she was placed under the observation
of doctors and others who testified to her authenticity.
Still a commission appointed by the Academy of Sciences
observed nothing but violent movements of her chair,
probably caused, they decided, by muscular force--
a testament to her strength, these stories

-- first female the speaker identifies by birth name, while the collective is called "Electric Girls"
-- "doctors" and "others" (and "the Academy of Sciences") call back to memory "two teenage girls" and "the victims" (and the "Electric Girls")
-- "nothing" and "probably" are vague, ambiguous details; also, "testament" and "stories"

like the skywriter's letters, forgotten,
abstracting into loops and dots around the sun.

-- the word "forgotten" is vague and ambiguous; also, it's juxtaposed against the word "abstracting," adding further confusion