Love and Death Speaking at Once
We come together. To love someone means to imagine
their death. 2 a.m. and you lie awake in fear of us. What if?
What if? Call your mother. Say you’re sorry. Call your
father. What? Call your sister. Memory sustains
and fades. Take a picture. Keep a journal. Underline,
doggy-ear, leave margin-notes in your book, mark it
with your touch. Do not go into a mountain alone.
Write the letter that embarrasses you, adulating,
undulating language, each line a petal in a dahlia.
Fields of swaying dahlias, you make them.
Yes, you can. Give that person a bouquet of dahlias,
grown, then cut for you; that is us, together. We are beautiful
together. If we make in you such tender-hearted anticipation—
is it so bad?
Body Of
My mother, teaching me how to protect my body:
when a man touches you here, yell I am a body
that will bear a child. How was I,
a child, to understand that as the sanctity
of my body. How was I to know to say,
The body without that potential is also whole
and holy. A man who touches a child
does not care whether she will one day be
fertile. A dear friend, on making the body
useful, encourages me to have
babies. What does it mean to say I have
my body. I have a brain, you know, I have
a life, a heart, I’ve said before, meaning
only mine, without knowing there were
outlines of other bodies fleshing in my center,
being the body of woman, for whom,
body means collective. As it is for the body
of evidence. Of knowledge. Here I present my body
of work. My body of water. Here, my body,
body. But we, are we? Of our bodies? Bodies are thrown
across oceans, across lands. Bodies lie
bleeding through the evidence of bullets. Honest
bodies bleeding honestly. In order to continue living,
we try to leave evidence of our lives. We accumulate
bodies in whatever way we can. Men leave
themselves in women’s bodies.
Friends, I am just now ready to love my own. I love
my father’s eyebrows on my face and I love
my mother’s calves on my legs and I love
the parts of my body that I do not name.
Let that be enough. The future of this land is uncertain
in how high the flames, the waters, will be.
This land in which I still bleed,
this land in which I give up
something every day.
Decency
When a man threw his fist into a wall next to my eye
I said that was love, that love was rage.
I was in the habit of loving anyone who laid a cold hand
on my face and said he’d pray for me.
Or anyone who prays. I thought apology
was love and so I loved to hear a man say sorry.
I loved to forgive because it meant I was a goddess. I forgave
because he couldn’t possibly forgive himself.
There’s a demon inside me, he said. Who cares if it’s a demon
when it is mine and I am greedy for it. No, and I don’t care,
do you hear me?—I’d say, and greed seemed to river
through my body. Even years later I could not speak of men
and their violence because I wanted to believe, yes,
in such a thing as decency in men I loved, that love
was decent. All the men who wanted me beautiful,
wanted me thin, wanted me with short hair, wanted me less
smart, wanted me, wanted me not, wanted me with pink
cheeks, wanted the best for me, wanted me in ruffled
skirts, wanted me naked, wanted me dead, all the men,
who wanted me, men who wanted, men who are
gone, not gone
enough.
