*Editor’s note: punctuation left as-is for artistic purposes! 

~

I want to be the guardian of desire,

Eve in the garden if she worshiped the serpent.

I want to extract marrow from the bones

tucked into the darkest spaces,

construct a necklace from antelope teeth

& praise the moon with grief-song

& mouthfuls of earth

I want to be the space the darkness comes creeping from,

the staff that draws a perimeter around every desire that was told it was too base when it was just honest.

I want to be annihilation, pleasure, & terror combined,

the Big Bang, capable of sustaining infinite globes of feeling.

I want to drive people to a place so alive that it alters

I want to be the sun that such aliveness spins around,

(also because I am sick of the comparison between patriarchy & illumination)

when it is woman who feels, woman who embodies, woman who reveals

due to her magick of unfurling her body from invisible places,

such as the place before the nameless shame

& tendency to hide one’s breasts,

the place before pleasure was regarded as suspect

or chaos incarnated in a clitoris,

back to when woman knew her body as the earth,

back to womb divination, telling time with feline irises, and reading menses

back to the tree from which archetype fell,

where Eve is still tasting from her own glossy fruit,

savoring that redness, sinking

into a creeping serpentine pleasure.

I want to be that pleasure: woman, suffused

with herself,

for herself : : woman.