In some countries they sew vaginas shut
so girls and women can’t feel pleasure. We
women stand braying on hind legs and bleed,
month after month, between months. We carry
our blood in clay jars on our heads; we must
keep going, not cry out. And those of us
without mutilated sexes do we really
get pleasured? If I weren’t so scared I’d
mutilate my flesh, burn it. Yet I burn
with rage at women who defeat themselves,
make themselves into pain devils
beside men, and destroy their souls. At night
the tree is practically in our bedroom
window, its leaves hiss in the wind; the dark
has made them invisible. I feel the tree’s leaves
touching my face, beckoning me to go with them,
dark and impermanent, a conspiracy
of black, those leaves burning in my heart, my
black soul. It’s raining. I stand by the window
listening to the soft suck of the wind.
Suddenly I remember the people
I left sitting in the café, and think
“I am going to die not so long from now.”
And I lean against the window and ponder
its tangled reflections. I go down through the streets,
descending like strips of black velvet in a sea
of leather. I see all kinds of womenfish, swim-
ming in packs, the womenfish dart in and out
of each other, their hues filling the streets.
By 2050 there will be no fish.
The sea will boil. The fish that depend
on it will die. I will have breasts like de-
flated balloons and a Brillo pad for hair.
Louise Gluck, Anne Carson, Kim Addonizio …
Their words stalk the grass of my memories
and dreams. Their words shimmer in the moonlight
of my indifference and open me up
like a seed pod. They drip like pollen from flower
to bee to flower, fertilizing the egg.
All I want is to stand in an electrified
field before I die. All I want is to dance
among surfaces of rough-cut ropes,
letting them chafe my cheeks.
This is what I crave.
I don’t have to say anything.
Like dead souls rising from the ash
the poems crackle and blaze forever.