Marty McConnell
if honeysuckle were skin it would smell like me
but I am seawater
and cloud-dust on your tongue --
my mother's luminous shadow, father's
fallow orbit, I sweat medicine
and the fears of women whose desperate acts of faith
earned them fading places in forgotten albums
in Oklahoma City and Galva,
the excesses of men with my
saber tongue, my persistent thirsts
(I never wear lipstick,
always expecting to be kissed)
touch me -- my back new asphalt
under bike tires, my hands half chalice
half dare -- know
that I have known this body twenty-nine years,
loved myself through awkwardness and aging,
in the backs of cabs and the beds of strangers
loved myself out of doubt
out of stubbornness out of the delusions
that tie us weeping and dazed
to those who never claimed
to love us
I forged this body from starch
and fury, prisms and hymns and I am not
only beautiful dressed and I am not
only beautiful naked / I'm the sum
of every whisper, every whistle,
every mouthful of blood and honey
and if honey were blood it would run
like this: thick and steady / viscous
and telling / taste me, iron
and lava / smell me . I reek of nights
purposely alone with the stars,
of impatience corseted with faith
more breakable than whalebone / I live
on the ledges of fingerprints / my children
will carry dictionaries on their hips
and envy the ignorant / I've said
this before and will again / listen
to the quickbreaths between blinks
can you hear my heart beating sideways?
I shimmy quiver shriek
laugh in bathtubs cry on streetcorners
I'm only trying to convince myself
I am not afraid
