I am my own land, unmanageable. There’s a cross
road where my hands and lips intersect
with an illumined city’s windows open to blackbirds
that promise to come through branches,
incising a woman’s kitchen, the reliquaria of domesticity –
white-draped ducks’ broken necks rising
on counters. How do I measure the body’s gardens
from within its bone fences? A woman’s skin
is one world. The birth canal is another – how you lived
in a bell or an oyster, rocking back and forth
in seaweed for a long time. Who hatches from it, shining
through rain? In the old world, piss prophets mixed
a woman’s lemon urine with wine to discern what
was in the womb. A hand held out for a zinnia
if she empties, if a distant horse runs back
to God, if a boat grows smaller, its cargo
of consecrated pears now rotting. My mother will curl
into herself, as will I, as did my grandmother, joints
unloosening more than a century after her birth. I put
the lines that grew on her skin into a bowl, muddy
my fingers in her waxiness and into her dead eye,
unraveling her, seaming her skin, blanching her
bones back to such a shine, like a giant star’s last open
into brilliance. The unhurried light is dying, drunken
bees dropping into water, isn’t it? My body is made
from these flat-footed women – when I step
outside not knowing where I’m headed, one of them wakes
from her dream of owls calling and hisses,
We created you from what we saved.