Burningword Literary JournaI: My Body, Your Choice

First published in Burningword Literary Journal, July 2025, Issue 115

My Body, Your Choice

Chromatic prism, ultraviolet light
waves toward my flat black pupil

a record
shuffling the same few songs.

Isn’t that what womanness has been about?
Repeated scenes:

the bonnet-donned bonnie
forking at the hay bale

the fish wife catching
her baby born under the stall

the silken onion skin
of the matron’s hands

as she uses a needle to connect
loop after loop.

“Our own” rotating square of green or taupe, mist, ash,
tobacco, brick, ultramarine, coal, pitch, straw–

is a boundary–tethered by the leather strings
of a coin purse held in someone else’s name.

The record changes its vessel:
cassette-compact disc-digital-multimedia.

A teen is taken
on a hill of quilted covers

the administrative assistant
pumps milk at her desk

a woman with a coif like a dollop of cream
greets you at WalMart.

Can anyone stammer blame if we wish
to pluck out our eyes like grapes?

Scratch, dent, break the cruel circle over our knees.