Your Body Remembers

Your body remembers
how to split open a peach
on the seam
with your teeth. With
your determination
and another slice of whiskey.
Cleaved palm heart
like a matricide, nothing
the silence and side-eye
can ever overcome. Ever
is a long time. More
like to be for now,
as the universe spins
her giant eye
of centrifugal force
like a tilt-a-whirl. None
of us fall off. None
of us split open
until we are forced
to. For some reason
we value our innocence,
our intact virginity.
But there is a method
of pottery mending
that fills all cracks
and breaks and repairs
with solid gold,
and proves then
that by breaking a thing,
one makes it even more
beautiful
than before. On a good day,
healing
could be like this. We
could be even
stronger
at the broken places.

Your body remembers
back before your feet
touched the floor
when you sat down,
after your first hairs
began to grow, what
it felt like to sit
down after the first
curious penetration.
Like a gap that
wouldn’t close.
Innocence is unnecessary
for worth, wisdom, and
wiles. Scars are required.
All those risks and
failings. Finding
homes, nesting
in our rafters,
making us try harder,
do it again, better
this time. Your body
knows what to offer.
Knows where your
place of power lives.
Knows how to exchange
breath with the earth.
Knows how to pray. Not
like a night hawk stalking
a shrew but like
the holiest of holy wells
and a thousand-year trek
of your people
that allows you
to reach one
perfect pocket-worn pebble
out over the very center
of the mystery, and
let go.