you saywe were nevermeant for this vowed life,golden bands of only us, and deathdo us part. you say love like it's held in quotation marks,that this union soured before it started.

the mind is a treasuretrove, an almanac, a tomb.

I stand in my own power now, the questions of permission that I used to choke on for my every meal now dead in a fallen heap, and when they tell me that I will fall, I nod. I will fall, I reply, and my words are a whispermy words are a howlI will fall , I say, and the tumbling will be all my own. The skinned palms and oozing knees are holy wounds, stigmata of my She. I will catch my own spilled blood, and not a drop will be wasted.

now I'm blinking in a new gloamingand all I see as I'm stretched low down hereis a world of women flat on their frozenfaces. we are the ground itself, corporealcarpet of cells, softness calloused hardbeneath the pebbled soles of the fathersand husbands and brothers and priestsand it's a horror if you could see it,a world of women ruinedby man's fear.

I hear talk of that slippery slope, and my heart catches for a beat. But there is the musky truth I'm standing in that I can't deny, and it tastes of so much holy. That old way, the narrow line, I see now that was a slippery, saccharine surface where my soul could gain no purchase. For the first time, my feet feel sure beneath me, and that sense is twining its way up from my ankles, racing toward my knees, my thighs, my secret places, my heart. It's in my blood now, and I can't deny it. I can't deny it. I open my eyes, because I could see even through my clutched-closed lids that the darkness is light, that the blindness has given way to searing vision. I can't deny it.

I wonder what freezesthe flurry of hurt on her cold-flushed cheeks, if his touch isa salve or the shattering.

absencelooks like a lake bed flooded with skysounds like cotton howlingtastes like tear-stained pillowssmells like churning bile and burnt hairfeels like screaming agony, my heart dying and dying

God,is there no faith left?He has not told. I would not know Him if I saw Him.

imagine the desertmothers, with hair tangledtighter than their theologyand breasts that flowed milkand mystic wisdom. theyknew how to draw the singingsigils in the sand, how to digrough and bitten fingersinto desiccated dirt for waterto wet the lips of their young.women of hips and heft, wholearned how to burnbeneath the wild and searingsun, who made loud loveagainst the star-flecked threatof night, who knew that strengthis not always a matter of muscle.imagine your ancestresses,the prophetesses of the aridlands, before these starchedtraditions and pews too hardto pray from, who bled trueritual and birthed their own fiercesouls at creation's crowning --

we have forgotten what night tastes like, salted by full moon silver rupturingthe dark. we have forgotten how the skin sings when the lunar fervor unfurls across its follicles.

we have forgotten how to press our fingers to the tilting planet's jugular and measure her pulse. we have forgotten symbiosis, that she is our mother.we have forgotten that when we rape our world we rape ourselves.

what is poetry if not seeing and feeling, and feeling, feelings running deepand okay – do I see, notice the gray pigeon feathers that heave by on drafts of passing cars reeking, leaking gasoline fumesand okay – do I feel?

I am at the gates of my own destruction.(Or so I'm told.)

do you dare to step in-to the vulnerable black, stripped to the soul with human blindness – when the full and weeping moon steps from the shade of a tumult of mountains – when, in the fragrant dim, day's tree stump transformsinto some nether-worldly other – when time's skin is thin and you arebared – when there is nothing between you and the Wildest Onewhose name is your own?