LAND OF THE ERODED WOMB

ISABEL BALÉE

***

retraced in the

body’s porous

spine:

line between

water & non-light

emptied from

continuities of death & cartilage,

fistfuls of lung

swelling & washing away

fluid buildup & spasm

shifting in each recollection, identical

in every hemisphere

of causality. that it fights

language of gutting & insists

on familiar shapes:

great hills of the body –

a slow decay –

a permanent

small lake

defense

against deluge,

wide stretches

of cindery waste.

***

i fear the body cannot love

the bitch of bone crowns & eyes

mythologically pooling into small

disgraces, nipples eroding in

swamp grass so high

uncovered only

after rigor. i fear

it is the woman

who turns over

in erosions of sleep, eyes dried

at the center

of anticlimax

buried in mudflats.

***

along blood-streaked edges

& oxbows, current slowing

at the mouth, the crevassed,

disordered landscape of my body

crawls invertebrately

not coming, flattened, swallowed whole

& hung like an old curtain,

dead of any noise

but the pressured speech

of cicadas.

if i cannot open myself

with my own hands

how could you navigate

the mutually oblique intersection

of the womb

& the womb’s resistance

where parts of the wall

still remain after

gutting,

fucked

repeatedly.