On the body (Cento with Emma Bolden and Shaindel Beers)
Dusti RW Levy
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Listen, even the birds sometimes believe their trees are singing.
There’s a sound the wind makes with the leaves, like the mind always is.
Like my mind always is. I was just standing in a moment of impossible quiet,
Until panic keened in my ears. In a thunder a blade of ice cracked
and fell. My favorite part of the act wasn’t the sparkle of red sequins,
the skimming of satin skirt flirting with thigh. I loved
the knife thwack, the shudder of pearl handle vibrating
when the blade landed true. Someone might understand the bird
of my heart always crashing against the cage of my ribs, the moth of
hidden fear fluttering to escape from my throat. If the saints are to be believed,
if this body is a dress, I really try to get past it, and I hope that other women do, too.
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Sources:
- “About the Human Hymen (Disambiguation)” (essay) by Emma Bolden, The Rumpus
- “Watching/Warning,” “Coda,” “Superstite,” “Beyond Love,” poems by Emma Bolden
- “A Chat with Shaindel Beers,” (interview) by Zinta Aistars, at The Smoking Poet
- “When we were knife throwers,” “The (Im)Precision of Language,” poems by Shaindel Beers
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Posted in When in Rome: Nov '25 and tagged in #poetry, Poetry