I wondered about my voice:
Where it lived, if it was mine.
While the pale blue oyster
at my throat made pearls
that gagged me
in my sleep.
Until I woke spitting,
feeling the stones in my belly.
Always unsettled, the nausea
of digesting my own gifts
like a snake eating its own tail;
consuming beauty.
You cannot live this way,
my body told me
when I huddled over the sink
with my fingers in my mouth,
again.
What can I extract, tortured,
from a life of unknowable
beauty?
There are pieces, still. Coming up.
Asking to be pinned and strung
against my throat
like tiny orbicular trophies.
“See where I’ve been?”
I want to make a dress with it,
to flatten the skins of these truths
into fabrics and wear them.
To press into my skin their elegant
glory, my body shining
like the burning, searing stars
I swallowed to become
me.
Come in, I say,
to the great darkness of my fears…
how it stretches its body across the waters
by my willingness,
its arms taking into itself, all of me…
all of me. I welt, and weep
a little: Tiny drops of wishing,
as I bow into the great weariness
and allow it to embrace me,
holding me in its arms,
lifting up into its gratitude
my whole, snarled confusion
like a lashed body
still bleeding.
“I know you,”
says the part of my soul
I thought was immune to this…
and it’s all suddenly OK.
As if the darkness could never
in a million years
undress me fully.