Category: Poetry and Other Writing

I

You were born with a nest
full of eggs in your chest
laid by some
alien queen mother at
the dawn of time for that right 
resonant
frequency and 

when her daughter speaks it an egg will 
wobble, microwave 
words heat it to hatching and a phoenix! and
my chest is full of hot feathers pinions tickle my throat a
rush.

This gasping feeling, a tumult as claws
grip the diaphragm I want it wants to burst
forth and we will pell-mell toward her on
golden wings and the ash from your passage will
choke her throat.

So stop! Swallow, larynx burning. 
But, after this crush, to 
hear her voice!

We choose my words like unripe plums, red, round,
supple skin but still hard. This one a breast,
that the bole from which Adam was fashioned.
She returns words in kind, a code of delicate
disproportion.

II

It is too much to touch; each other, the twin bird
we suspect nests in her chest, the easy word 
like a crocus in the crack of a
sidewalk.

III

Yet not enough. 
To touch is to ripen;
flesh bruised under my fingers,
bite the hip, taste the waist.

You shall all learn that
I am my own kind of animal.

IV

Alien queen mother, strands of
molecules spun, entangled in centuries
to make us marionettes, your eggs take
little sitting in your lust
for children.

V
The right tone must not be thrown
lightly.

We're
not all strong enough to wait.