November 25, 2003
Authoress
It snowed today. Not proper snow, more like a rain transformed, hinting, biting into the cheek and thus the mouth, the soul. I could taste winter, the desperate kiss of an old man, old lips, blue-veined and dry with death. He wants to rise to me but cannot. His fingers tighten on my wrist, the skin cracks but he is unable to bleed.
I thrust my pen into his eye, transforming him into a poem. I borrowed his blood for ink, and, as I drained him, I thought I heard something like grace cross his lips. It could have been the immortal wind, to which I have now joined him. For what is poetry, painfully wrought metaphor, but life's elixir? I sate my desire for self in my penchant for the erasure of it; I am a woman, a mother, consumed by her creation.
I have chosen a different womb.
I can invite who I wish, where I am warm and drunk on wine, where tissue swells and retracts, envelops and abandons. I know I do better than mimic masturbation, not even my own. Where is the phallus at the moment of birth?
Absent, forgotten. Here. I've swaddled these ashes. I used to keep them under my skin, those gray circles under my eyes. Plant them and I promise they will grow.
astera at 12:22 a.m.