Tuesday / Wednesday
Tuesday: Happy Face
I trap my shadow.
I pin it by footpad to the concrete.
I crush it.
Last night’s mark,
A happy face not yet faded,
Smiles on the interior of my wrist.
Happiness wanes
At the terminal point
Of the imagined slice.
Wednesday: Fruiting Zen Magnolia
Have you ever seen the effrontery
Of the magnolia fruit?
Before it bursts open, it appears as engorged
Labia pressed shut in a modest pink blaze.
Is it Magnolia acuminata or Magnolia
Zenii whose fruit discomfits me,
On a desultory Wednesday
Morning, in my mourning black shoes?
It unsheathes itself in delirium —
An effulgence of unhooded clitorises!
They burn my face
Engorged with life.
A wild orgiastic sight
In a moment so unsettling,
So thoroughly disorienting,
A tectonic change of mood:
Precise.
Carnal.
Life.
“I’ve written stuff amidst hideous suffering, and it was a way not to be so stuck in the hideous suffering, though it was hard, but also, hard is not impossible, and I didn’t sign up with the expectation that it would be easy.”
— Rebecca Solnit
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