While other girls were testing
the firm peach of their bodies against
Apollo’s golden shield, I was looking for ways
to tear out of mine like a wetsuit.
To swim away, bold and magenta fish
far beyond the Pharaoh’s hook of my father’s pain, the hollow
floor of the boat where he waited like a great immoveable
kedge in the gull’s cry and bright green foam
of my childhood. I believed in him, believed
in the fate of fish, to sift the planet’s most plentiful
element through their bodies and be reeled in by hunger,
to smash against wood, metal and be buried in ice
for distant mouths to swill in fiery wine, to enter
the void with open eyes. I walked
in my body, like a long tan belt dragged it
through the teeth and laws of men, the hotel rooms
of their hearts, cocks like the staff of Moses which gulped down
the kingly cobras, to see what would
flake away or continue their dim existences
beneath the migrant furniture, the power of the poison
of my own making. And I am not Christ or the Buddha
but I know what it is try to climb out
of the body, its walls of moss and melanin
by deprivation or desecration the wish
to quit standing in the middle of it like Jupiter’s hurricane
raging without end, the red navel, the hurt
that is topography and blueprint, crew and ship.
I have pushed and pushed this body against the lips of fire,
observed bruises bloom like a reluctant spring,
and after my son was born I sank into it like quicksand
on the blue sky of the hospital bed, the raft of frozen bandages,
blood that poured over the flogged hills like a royal army,
blood that besieged. For months
I thought about sitting still, about gravity doing its work
as nerve ends bared themselves across the abyss life had burst
through, months glistening in the clit’s moon and tides
of the labia like needles. When you kiss me
there, like a man who loves his woman in spite of her
galaxy of scars, when you tongue the remains
of the pyre into a banquet fit for warriors about to embark
on the longest journey of their lives, you are saying
what language never will, that I am
safe, worthy – that I never should have been
broken into by force.
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