How to Describe the Desert Without Saying Water - Jessica Goodfellow
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Wanted: bauble of milky mouth.
Fat knee of shameless need, kneading.
Wanted: fontanelle ticking, a fist
of collateral tightening. Frightening
whorl of faintest resemblance—thin
as glaze, angle, or desire.
What I wouldn’t have (forsaken).
Crone whispered, Bridegroom hissed—
My groggy head in vespers once
northward canted. Cant = can’t.
My fault. Crone’s nostrums: always
it was water, variables afloat, science
listing. Crone intoned the Water Deva,
snake in the well. From feminine flotsam
infused a brooding brew. Awoke my desert(ed)
troth to sit unsheathed in a rainstorm.
The one constant was water—no planet
without it breathes. I was no planet.
And now. My moon blooms amphibian.
Glory, my taproot has plummeted.
My matrix is configured. Hosanna.
Madonna figure, de rigueur,
who once beleaguered be.
Full regalia my penetralia is.
Jessica describes "How to Describe the Desert Without Saying Water" as "an expression of my own body's transitional place between infertility and pregnancy (but not infertility and fertility; my experience has been, once infertile, always infertile, even after the babies come. And they did come.)
Jessica describes "How to Describe the Desert Without Saying Water" as "an expression of my own body's transitional place between infertility and pregnancy (but not infertility and fertility; my experience has been, once infertile, always infertile, even after the babies come. And they did come.)
1 comment:
pretty cool
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