The Planetary Feminine
Scratching
Passover Poem


The Planetary Feminine

Stomping on my summer like a storm
Drops are white wine filled goblets
And break on noses

Once I was a daughter
And I clung to dresses of someone taller
Once I was a mother, wrapping the world around my shoulders;
A coat made of water
Now a collective matriarch again,
I'm under
and of the ground.


Scratching

Since it's new and
Because maybe I won't like something about the beauty mark on his arm but
I will like something about the way he thumbs my face.
And won't I learn something new about myself then?

But how to settle the body's impossible waves of domestic disquiet;
The inside, when the core from
Where the lifeblood of a family begins is
Useful only to satisfy an itch?

Who can I blame for not creating the fitting anatomical pieces
For all the differentiating cranial tugs on the physical form?

Putting the tasting and the inhalation of this new smell first
And putting aside for later, the asking of these questions
To a cloudless, unmoving sky.


Passover Poem

My only faith is in the brokenness of my body
And in absences
The way missing teeth feels in the red fold of tongue
How nostalgic I am for the sharpness of the bones in my hip

No, I have faith in forgetting—
Touches that are useless to me now
But that I've tried
Up until this very minute just to shake

Have you seen me?
Pounds of excess pink oyster flesh are profound on my frame
Tenderness is something that slips on ocular salt and away from me

Faith is something far away and deep in the cage of my ribs
But like everybody
There are limits
There are limbs