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.