land of eroded womb
***
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.
.
.
Isabel Balée was born and raised in New Orleans and has roots in Belém do Pará, Brazil. She received her MFA from Brown University in 2015, and currently teaches creative writing at Tulane University. Her work has appeared or is forthcoming in Prelude, Deluge, ICHNOS, Littletell, Fanzine, and Alice Blue Review.
