Burningword Literary JournaI, July 2025, issue 115

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 bail

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 knee.