Wasn’t it just yesterday I wore my heart upon my sleeve, was I not a place where lace would become bone. Now I sit with the richest coffee in the bluest room in a house occupied mostly of wind. Poetry, golden leaves atop a broken crown. words falling all around me and my stomach knotted (the perfection of being bound) a braid of hope, desire and departure.
There is something in sensuality we will never touch.
It is what keeps us coming back to a thing we do not recognize save for in the cup of silence.
There is a place within us we clumsily reach out to touch
and it is crying, its tears are shed in reverse, we swallow them and glow with the blood of all the things we cannot make our own.
Even the flesh will leave the flesh
of itself. Mothers, infants, fathers who have buried their wives. Mothers and daughters and sons, turning in hand-linked circles. Children born of children under an exploding sky.
When I wash foamy upon your shores you do not see me. Woman as fish, woman as bird wing bent, woman as wave which curls like a soft breast underneath your palms, your feet, your tongue lapping at the edges of the sun.
There are those who can write of the way they feel in a way which collects the crowds, I sink behind them. Woman as sunset, woman as sea bed, woman as sandshell, woman as the length of an afternoon shadow as you walk in humid shapes alone.
The time for tea has come and fallen away, the time for dreaming has been nailed to the wall and stopped breathing.
My baby, what shall we pray for. A pale body and soft bones. To sail off upon the breeze and demand nothing of the water. To be untangled of hate and fall naked before the wild. Time wrapped around our necks like iron. The time before the time we’re after.
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Allison Marie Conway 