her life was all right. She ate, when available, the foods
she liked best, and moved her chair while reading
to the sunniest spot. She presumably prayed for some time, then decided to move on
to more fruitful endeavors, like grooming her eyebrows, or organizing the kitchen drawer,
always a mess. I’m sure she enjoyed a good joke. Occasionally had trouble
with self-esteem, generosity. She was the kind to need and need, like me,
endlessly. So when one day that god walked by, all boyish good
looks and not looking her way, she didn’t, for a moment, hesitate, she did
what I couldn’t do—a miracle within reach, she took it.
IMMACULATE OR OTHERWISE
Though I’m not trying, I am
disappointed. Mary did nothing
and God grew like a seed. I fuck men
and receive the punctual mess.
Always they think I should be grateful
for the stain like a petal pressed
between my legs, think this a miracle
against their clumsiness, the wilted
condom leaking in the dark.
There’s a reason, my halfhearted
mantra against all that dejects
me: the first tumor budding
in the uterine wall, then the second,
the relentless deluge of blood.
My days persist conceptionless,
immaculate or otherwise.
I find success in determinable things.
But still, the sting remains:
my body one unchosen, vessel
of illness and ache. Call it irrational
prayer of the secular heart, progenitive urge,
but there’s a reason, I know, why
I cry His name in the dark.
GOD’S WILL
When a child latches in the hollow
of a woman like a leech,
it is Your will.
And, too, when the body fails
and leaks like bad fruit,
it is Your will.
Once, you were clear
with your intentions, you left
no room for dispute—
your voice coming
through to Mary
like a snake through black water—
now, nightly, my ear
toward heaven
a cup catching shadows.
If Your word is Your will
and Your will is all,
collude with me.
TESTIMONY
There is a god, and there is no God but Him.
He has many names and answers to none.
On the Day of Judgment I will be called by my name and by the name of my father.
My name the dark I was forged in.
Dark which rehearses its return while I sleep.
Indeed, one day I will return to God, as it is to Him that I belong.
Indeed, this was part of the Message, and the Message was received.
I do not speak for God and He does not speak to me.
This an (arrangement/estrangement).
When asked my religion I answer surrender.
I pray with my head to the floor, with my hands where He can see them, with both eyes closed.
All this for Paradise, which lies at the feet of mothers.
Beneath my feet the temporal earth.
Which darkens where I stand.
PRAYER
until the blood surged I knew it only
as song Your word a piteousness
of doves pouring from my throat Your word
an asp whispering through shadow to more
shadow it was easy I learned early how
to beg and ask nothing I thought pleading
was the point I fell diurnal like a sun
to my knees I prostrated to distance
myself from smoke I yearned for
Your attention I did not comprehend
what was said of those who have evoked
Your anger or of those who
are astray each time I intoned so be it
ZINA
Verily, it was heaven.
allow me I couldn’t be certain You would
so I sought my own admission
in the body
of a man.
You, my Lord. Verily, I mistook him for
God, I invoked another
I invoked an other.
I proffered myself, I prostrated— Before him
And pleasure an oblation.
angels chorused through me,
or an exaltation
And each part aroused from sleep.
knew itself named
in praise.
And the beast I was was
glad.
Verily, a woman, the first
night of nights
I required a man’s flesh to come
alive—
I was afflated his mouth grazed everywhere
he touched me and each time he touched me
anew as though making me
with his own two merciful hands.
NULLIGRAVIDA NOCTURNE
And they ask you about menstruation. Say, “It is
harm, so keep away from wives during menstruation.
And do not approach them until they are pure.”
the Holy Qur’an, 2:222
He touches me.
Reaches across our mattress
on the floor like a raft, adrift in night’s black
gulf. Headlights glide over the opposite wall.
Gilded. Quick. His hands
cresting the waves of my hips.
In the dark, I leak
more darkness. Inside,
an endless well. I know
now, deep within myself, myself
as harmed. Know deeper
the man I love
will never harm me. He’s no god
but good
to me. Like blood, the night
comes and comes and
comes. I was taught
for years a touch like this
was fruitless, a sin
to love when love couldn’t
root as proof. His
hands on my hips despite,
moored. If asked,
I’d make the trade—give up the inconceivable
heaven for a warmth
I can sense, the faithless
man who draws toward me
through shadow, knowing
who I am, what I can’t be.
MORNING
I take the last grapefruit from the bowl and hold it
to know its weight. The doctor told me
the tumor has grown, is now this size. In my hands,
it feels conquerable, rind giving in to the press
of my thumb, pliable and sweet. A miniature
dimpled sun. I cleave it open and begin
plucking out its seeds. Beside me, a waiting
cup, an empty bowl. I watch as they fill slowly,
cradle morning’s flush of light.
ANNUNCIATION
All night I leak a shadow
from the place I first learned shame.
All night the milky curve of the moon
pressed to the window like an ear.
God, I know you are
there, you are everywhere.
And yet you fixed her
in a shaft of light
and sent a man
who would not touch her, frightened
though she was.
You were there in the room
as you are here in the room
and the dark through
which I beseech you.
The man beside me
slumbers messageless,
unwinged. All night I listen
for you listening. If there
is something you need
to tell me, God, you
must
tell it to me
yourself.
THE HANDSOME YOUNG DOCTOR, WHO IS VERY CONCERNED
The handsome young doctor, who is very concerned
with the future possibility of my body
in a bikini, insists
morcellation—a tiny bicorned prong
inserted through
a minuscule slit in my belly. You’ll barely see it
he says, grinning
as though I’m already convinced. I imagine
the tumor minced, the blade a dervish
spinning. I say I’ve read
this is dangerous. He says, impassive, of course,
everything has risks.
Already checking the time on his wrist.
MORCELLATION
from the French
Less
invasive
the doctor says.
To break into
pieces.
Little morsels,
little slits
(for me) to come out of
(myself).
Mon corps—
my body—
a corpse,
a mis-
translation.
As I keep mistaking
blood
for song,
God
as something
owed to me.
But the tumor lacks
language
and so, in this way, is
infallible, and so
a little
like God. And, like God,
the terror is in knowing
it could be
malignant, could be
everywhere and all
at once.
LANDSCAPE WITH BLEEDING WOMAN
after Simon Jordaens’s Christ Healing the Bleeding Woman
The clouds’ batting overhead
like a gauze-swaddled seam, dirty cotton.
I see nothing as it is anymore; since
remembering my body as temporary, I impose it
anywhere it fits.
Could the trees be
trees, or are they stitches
suturing mud to heaven?
In a landscape I consider
first what interests me, the living
beings, which I identify as
those that bleed. There, interrupting
the skin of a field—sheep and shadow and one
woman on her knees.
I won’t be the last
to look into a painting
like a mirror, to ignore
the glutted world in order
to better scrutinize the self. Is that me
crouched at the feet
of a god?
Of course it’s not.
But say it was—untouched, He turns
away from me.
ODALISQUE (POLAROID TAKEN ONE DAY BEFORE THE SURGERY)
Look, I said.
That is the point.
Or, I said nothing. My lips
ornamental.
Or, my eyes spoke.
Or as good as spoke, agape
as two black maws
entering the conversation.
This is clear: my eyes looking
to ensure
you are looking.
Focus, I am
subject, supine in a bed
of white linens, pillows—I am framed within
the frame by a window
so white the world is
effaced.
Yet I remain,
I am limned
by its absence, and here
you are, with me, looking. (You want
the particulars; I deny you
the particulars.)
The scene, lacking
distraction, concedes me inordinate
importance, this is how
I see myself,
and how I wish to be seen—
but my body has
its own demands.
Does it silence or enliven
your desire, the reminder
I will one day die?
(This the question my body asks.)
ANNUNCIATION
I have come to accept the story of my own
obedience—how I waited not knowing
I was waiting, ear obliging, body
poised. You sent a man I could not
look at fully, or touch, he was a flame
which spoke, and I could not
be afraid—as it’s told,
I rose instinctive as a dove
startled into flight, blue
veil fluttering
floorward and tongue
unglued—may it be done
to me I said, and it was done
so quickly, I thought to say it
meant I had some say, but it was
preordained—the breath
barely out of my body
before my mind had changed.
MYOMECTOMY
At the center of the dark
room an aureole: there,
pricked at the wrists
by IV cords, robed except for
the waist, my body
lay reposed and bleeding
like the inverse of the child-
God, my body left
open like a window.
They entered, innominate
doctors, their hands blue
as sky slipping through that oculus
to retrieve what had taken root—
it resembled a pomegranate
when lifted into view, ruddy
globe cradled by two hands, fruit
of the dead—but it was not
dead, nor was I, I was still
living, that bright vermilion
my proof—and so, like me,
they split my womb
right down the middle, the wound
precise. And from beneath
the tumor emerged, eager, as if to be
born—bald creature with no father
and no future. Savior of no one.
WAKING AFTER THE SURGERY
And just like that, I was whole again,
seam like a drawing of an eyelid closed,
gauze resting atop it like a bed
of snow laid quietly in the night
while I was somewhere or something
else, not quite dead but nearly, freer,
my self unlatched for a while as if it were
a dog I had simply released from its leash
or a balloon slipped loose from my grip
in a room with a low ceiling, my life
bouncing back within reach, my life
bounding toward me when called.
POSTDILUVIAN
And it was not done at once. And ache gyred like a dove unable to land. I was adrift in pain; I floated in and out and could not see beyond it. I thought it was the new world in which I would learn to live. But in a moment of clarity, the window, its curtains parted starkly like a tempest. Outside the pane, the actual world revealed. Houses, copses, lives of strangers flotsam doused in shadow. A sanguine glow soaking back into the earth. And what was left of it drained slowly from the room.
REMISSION
Because I cannot stand
he carries me: lifts me from the bed as though I might
be further injured by his touch, or as if afraid it might be painful
for him to touch me. In my bathroom’s glow, his shadow or an Orans, before him
I raise my hands; it is the hardest thing I have done all day. Pain, and the shame
of pain, and the pain of shame—he slides the night-
gown over my head and I am bared, livid
from the waist down as if vestured in an ultramarine
slip, the umbilical catheter strapped to my thigh by elastic
like a garter, cicatrix stitched across my abdomen taut
red thread, fraught with my own refractory
blood—I weep when he sees an
d does not turn away
from me. A freshet of fresh shame: not to be beheld by him but to be
held, gently, dipped backward into the shower’s stream, everywhere his body touches mine
darkening as if wounded—touched like this
after so long, so readily, I was convinced his love an affliction, my one
transgression. Wished, having known it, never
to have known it. And, knowing this, and without a vow to bind him to me,
he rinses my hair. Sits with me in the tub
like a boat at the center of a world with no one in it, where what will be
done is already done and there is no need anymore
for forgiveness. A long time like this. And when
I try to speak, from overhead water rushes
to fill my mouth, softly shushing.
AND IT WAS SAID
Unable to move, I am lying in bed. The milky March light
diffused like mist, at once everywhere
though I did not notice it
filtering in. The phone pitched between ear
and bare shoulder. My body
cut open in the neat and deliberate way.
I place my hands over the wound, though I am sure
it’s still there. The doctor’s voice
sudden in the empty room like the voice of God. Everything
white and stark as the conception