She is nude
Dearticulate
Her nipples graze the passage of her downfall
Blood is dry and hennaed between her thighs
Who stand witness
To aborted possibility cut short
Held glistening above her in crucifixed parody
She will never bear life
It is not her weft and the thick choker around her neck
Tightens as reminder
If she grows swollen it will be from loss not gain
No feeling of a child pushing its way out
Only the deadening cold taste of metal on her skin
A doctor’s “tut, tut” and rough handling, his voice a graze
Staining her inevitable socially affixed shame
She stares out of a small window
Paint pealing like tears on the empty sill
Where a bird sits sheltering from rain
She thinks of him cutting his way into her with flint eyes
Hands around her throat, pulling her apart
A flashlight douses darkness, shining on blood and her hand
Reaching out
She is empty now
Passion snuffed, an ember no longer close to surface
She is an arroyo dried and crusted over
She is a gourd grown without seed
Disappointment is her meal, she is a featherless bird on wire
Dried empty by sun and rinsed of music
Before this, her watermelon body swayed in water-sprinklers
Feasting on her abundance and possibility
All that would be, all that would be
Is laid waste
Tumbleweed and Joshua tree
Punishment and consequence
The rapist will return at night to his wife and
Three blonde children
She will recover from her tears and cuts
Even the shame of feeling his soil enveloping her
But she will never
Never
Forget what he took in miscarried act
What would happen if we swapped vision?
The fridgidity of growth or a certain constraint
Because if you split my casing I would possess less chance
My surround would envelop your shadows and night cross twice
For women have a shorter life and a longer one
Small boned with narrow shoulders and deep set eyes
Stretching barren like a long road through desert
If she could turn the knife around
Press it gently against his steady pulse
Cut out the evil as he removed her chance
To fill her arms
With life