~ “and after this, our exile” ~

Your body betrays you, my mother said. With such eyes

and breasts, you will live suffering desire and the savage

ways of men, well known, or well spun. The inarticulate

hunger, loving conversations just the whetting of

the knife – unreliable, my sisters told me, don’t turn

your back. A lover, an untamed creature or

a tide coming in, from far creeping up. And I have

seen my beauty taken (under the tongue, and out of

the room), felt lips tearing through ventricle, and still

their story (those women who love me) their story

is not my own. I thirst. I raise my head from drinking, cum

and cartilage drip from my teeth – pleasure is not

an open meadow, but liminal space where grassland

turns over into forest, though not quite as dark, nor

yet as final – between two, a species of emptiness

filled with all we stand to lose

in possession. Here, I hunt – my smiles,

arrows tipped with poison; my body’s sway, gentle

barb slow burrowing deeper – if he cuts me out, he’ll

bleed to death. To death, the edge I poach along, licking

bones in winter, cherishing the wound unhealed,

the permeable moment before the scar closes, seals

me from a dangerous, fluid world. If my desire could only

be as simple as men, and flesh

satisfied, but words move fleeter in the underbrush,

labored breath of language more alluring, shuddering,

fingers gather, stroke, wring.