Female Pelvis

Female Pelvis

I.

After six months in Hades, Persephone brought us the Death-time, went from being a jewel of fertility to the woman who made all green things shrivel and die. All because she was hungry. All because she gave in, and not knowing if she would ever be rescued. Eve, too, but she tried to come out of the darkness, and in doing so we all are punished with pain and death forever. Always, the girl just reaches out her hand a little, and gets hacked off at the elbow.

II.

I just wanted you. It was okay at first. But after we found a rhythm, oh, I knew what the fuss was about, when you could bring me down and then push me over and over again, into a land that didn’t feel quite safe, where I would lose my feelings of control—how I never really did feel safe giving them up to you and how I never really should have, my mother was right and I knew too late—where my mind would get carbonated, coming up from all sorts of places in my body, my cunt my spine my brain my stomach my womb my asshole, but the bubbles were filled with tiny thoughts of YES and OH SHIT and I THINK I LOVE YOU and THANK YOU GOD and WHAT THE FUCK IS THIS and STOP THIS NOW and NEVER STOP IT and GOOD. And you, all coyote smiles and gravelly raven coos, you’d let my mind get mostly air in the top and then stop. Sometimes you wouldn’t even want one, just made me come again and again and again. I thought you generous because I was young.

When I was fruitful, your hand, dry and rough in mine, slipped your friend’s arm around me because you had a gig that night and had to sleep. He was perfectly gentlemanly with me at the first circle of hell, took me back, still shedding slivers of our shade, to your home. And I was able to cramp and bleed and ooze in your bed for four days and you held me soft as sand against the window in the desert. When I was done with the worst of it, I drove myself home.

Your kind still appeals to my body. I still feel that tiny pull of hipbones to the greasy film, two days of beard, affected lazy eyelids. But the furthest I go now is a free drink and a well-executed tongue down my throat in a dirty bathroom stall. I still have your picture, though. I still have it.

Left Clavicle, Anterior Surface

Left Clavicle, anterior surface

You have birds in your body.

Trapped in your chest, biding their time.  Tiny gulls, or raptors, the bone birds wait.  You will metamorphose into something they can use.  Patience now in a flesh tumbler. 

Some bodies are more restless than others, still feel steeped in cold, delicious air, mistake hypnic jerks for the free fall of flight off of sheer cliffs.  You can see the pupal bird in a dancer’s chest.  See, see them there, in the underfed overworked body, bulging out under her neck, a thick bridge between her shoulders in such a thin sylph.  O! if only she could whittle down the bones!  See her at home.  See her room.  A bed, a desk, a scale.  Calories only one day out of four, but nothing can take weight off of the jutting pelvis, thorny vertebrae, clumsy scapula.  But as she bends and twists and turns on the floor in her pointe shoes, hour after hour after hour, the radius to the ulna to the humerus to the clavicle to the sternum pushes up off of the spine, taking the ribs with it, she becomes most magnificent, as much a tribute to god as any aesthetic or whirling dervish.  If only the roommates would get off her back the bird would fully enter the imago state instead of snapping back in when her head gets woozy.  If only.

Male Pelvis

Male Pelvis

He always asks her to kneel before him.  Loves, loves to see her look up at him.

“You’re so beautiful, there like that.  I wish you could see yourself.  You’d know.  How beautiful you are.  I wish.”

Are her eyes almond shaped?  That’s the only way he hears eyes described.  Almond shaped.  Doe-eyes, those too, but hers are hazel.  That’s exotic, isn’t it?  Isn’t it.

He gets on his knees as often as he can in front of her, supplicates himself to make it even.  While she’s doing the dishes, “I worship the ground you wash on,” he says, and she doesn’t laugh.  While she’s typing, while she’s on the toilet, even.  As soon as he comes in the door before his keys are in the dish of change he falls to his knees, a knight before his queen, having won the joust.

But nothing, nothing is like the times when his flesh is hot between her sweet ragged teeth and her chapped lips are grazing his cock again and again and he’s looking down at her and he owns her just for these few minutes.  Yes.  His.  Mine.  And his mind unfolds at the base of his spine and god pours up from her throat.

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I wrote a little book of prose poems a couple-few years ago called Anatomancy, but I've sent it around and I don't think it's going to get published for Reasons, so I'll probably just put the best poems up here in drips and drabs when I get to it. "Anatomancy" was a word I made up to mean divination on the body. I illustrated them with old Grey's Anatomy pictures I overlayed new text on to give them dual meaning. I hope you like them.