Dear Emily,

Your words rest
in quiet proof
of an unfettered life.

Spared public shame
and private scorn,
never heralded: wife.

Not from your father
forced to cringe
from a stranger's touch,

Nor be belle
of any ball.

Life, for you, lay undefined,
waiting for your pen.

In your words lay
humble truths and
worlds yet unexplored,

a testament to
freedom, neither
cherished nor deplored.

No expectations
nor demands, no
pedestal from
which to fall--

One doesn't have
to have seen much
to have seen it all.

La Mer

I.
In plague times, people thought the disease
passed from a glare, or spit,
that humours were scales, or guards,
a line of defense against illness.
Words became poison.
The wind, cursed.
Curses came too, like venom
from a woman's mouth.
Forced into seclusion
for seeping her fluids on birthing blankets
crying out as a person escapes
the prison of her body
jealous now, and lonesome,
the child's freedom haunts her.

The only solace is peanut butter kisses
on a tired sideways face
sucking chocolate milk from a straw.
In the dark, he looks again like a fetus,
blurring features from an ultrasound.
It's like he's come home,
no longer the stranger who eats at different times,
and runs while she types,
who speeds cars across the tile,
while she hides behind a book and a headache,
ashamed to say, "Never leave me again",
who knows her body rejected their bond,
that she pushed, screamed, cursed him out
to become something new.

Something dies when a child is born.

We don't say it; we take motherhood graciously,
but in every silent kiss,
each washed knee,
a plea is made,
"Come back."

II.

Women gave birth to nation's leaders
and warriors alike, priests and scientists
who, after deserting their womb, grew to write Leviticus:

Women are unclean. They cannot be touched
during their moontime.
They must hide their brazen
leaking for a month, or three.  Live in shame
for doing what we praise the Almighty for.

The plague finds blasphemous times,
and feeds off fears.
Lines are drawn
to fight the natural order
of bugs, death, shit.

We wash, kill, and create air-conditioned havens
from other sentient beings.
Spring is the time for fucking.
New life springs
from our wanton loins
as from reptiles and insects.  We're bigger,
no, we're smarter, no, we're made in God's image.

III.

A man gets his day in court for raping
a 92-year-old woman.
Twice. "The Naked Burglar"
wears a suit for his big trial.

IV.

In plague times, women's leaky organs
made lies out of prayers.  The rain
could not be trusted, the sea
brought bad winds, and midwives
were murdering thieves.

They were also Searchers:
The first morticians who read dead bodies,
wrote cause of death, and waited
for a surgeon to check their work.
They could not be trusted.
Men could not cry.
Women were doomed for bleeding.

Humours became hysteria,
and the plague of woman raged on,
through the cotton gin, to abolish slavery,
and ban whiskey in its wake.
Women hold office, run Nike, and bake
pre-formed cookies.
But there's still Non-specific Stress Disorder.

And the rain.
That, still, cannot be trusted.

Growth

I remember a white dress with red satin trim
dirt caked under my fingernails, between my toes.
I was three, and you were explaining
to me why I couldn't plant an apple tree
in Florida.  I couldn't understand how a place
good for growing so many other trees
couldn't grow apples.  I dropped the core,
seeds and all, into the earth, in defiance of you,
and of nature.  I dropped it in a cold corner
near the front of the house, and sat above that spot
all summer, sucking ixora nectar
as I waited.
No apples grew out of the earth
that fall, but that core took me into the ground,
showing me the secret to growing things unseen.