How long you’ve been so sick—seasick, clinging to
This torn edge of the earth’s last rock by your
Fish-bitten fingernails.
Wounded, wrapped in shredded love stories,
Your blood gleams on your drenched thighs
And rolls into the sea that won’t let you sleep.
Flea-bitten,
Feverish,
Lying between dogs and broken bottles,
Excrement and rotting melons and jeweled houses.
In your insomnia you dream a little—
Fever dreams, silver fish streaming in the ocean.
My love,
Blood of my root,
Your own broken body scattered across your hills
To each and every direction, your endless
Steps of cracked spine
Tossed and turned by this angry world and you,
Relentless
As a Titan, chained in the salt and sun
And rain that chills even your oldest ghosts—
Your trickster heart always good to eat.
You’re always good to eat, and
In your confusion you nourish multitudes,
Including me.
You live despite the prognostics, which is why you
Mourn your malignant mass with so much laughter.
Known by your fish-skin hands and your knife,
No one has ever gutted anything with as much tenderness
As you open up your decaying beasts of mansions that
Rattle in the wind,
Hollow,
Such sublime skeletons with their rheumy fists raised
Against your suicidal coastline,
All peeling wood and blood wine that
Consecrates your most broken things.
You condemn all who love you to suffer the
Warring factions of earth and sea in
Your split chest.
You cry,
You cackle,
You sing to your trembling hills
With an unforgivable art that turns their pains
Into your most shining parts.
It is, in fact, your beauty that is so shocking,
Or maybe sinful,
Too-sweet and too-much and too-sorry,
So is it any wonder that so many turn away from
Your missing teeth and your old sea breath,
The blood on your thighs and your fishnet knuckles
As you wander screaming at no one,
At everyone—
Just another interpretation of God?
Your dead lie forgotten, entombed on the edge of the sea,
Their names erased by your own briny finger,
And they walk only at that time of night when
You belong to the seagulls and the dogs.
For how long have I known
Exactly what your ships say in the dark,
For how long have I tripped on
Your rain-lit streets at night
Only to see my eyes in your face?
WanderWoman 