Day 22: Domestication

In every bird, soaring speck of freedom

Spinning in a murmuration, lies a stone

The relentless tug of gravity

In equilibrium with flight

In the wild woman, the true mammal

Lurk the chains of domestication

Hear them rattle, hear the crack

Of the cattle prod, the fear of shackles

Grow hair like weeds, roam and remember

The women who never left the farm

Unhushed blood, all animal and genius

The soft body Oliver wrote of

Feeling the hounds on your heels,

The bondage of your grandmothers

Be free like it cost something,

Pump blood like the dam broke down

Day 21: Ligon

Read a woman's poem last year

First line said "I am a good man"

It rattled my ribs, resonated

Said it out loud as soon as I saw it, because

When you get called princess enough,

You gotta look in the mirror, straighten up

And try to see a knight instead

Said it the same way I say my last name

In a voice that straightened my spine

You can translate it to shovel, spade.

Doesn't matter what you call it,

So long as you move the dirt

Couldn't call yourself bored in my parent's house

Dad would hand you a shovel
Tell you to get to digging

When truckers call me princess

I want to say Ligons aren't princesses

Just folks with dirty nails who'll never gamble

Just good men

Day 20: Mother Buzzard

Tell a woman you like her dress,
Watch her hands fly down to her hips
Grinning, she will say these four words:
And it has pockets!

It's rumored women didn't get pockets
Because witches held poison in their pants
Casting spells from their trousers

Funny how women still carry it all
Basket on the head, baby on the hip
Infant to the chest, hands kneading dough

Your mother is the buzzard bearing a yoke
World in her talons, death in her mouth
Breathe, unable to smell the rot of death
Ask who has fed from grief, purified your air

Day 19: The Mulberry Tree (I shall not survive you)

Mulberry Tree, I shall not survive you.
Cursed plant, poisonous, save the fruit
Fermented stench, bloodstained red
Homage of Thisbe, tree of grief

Blooming like it's the last time,
An explosive flowering in July
Berries like a Hail Mary
Black mulberry, tragic, hopeless enough
For Van Gogh to capture it from the asylum
Before failing to survive

Day 17: Gratitude and Funk

after Gabrielle Calvocoressi

Got a high five while out running

Put some pep in my step, faster than ever

I used to be an insomniac when I could feel my heartbeat

Had to smother my head with a pillow until it felt still

Now my pulse rings me like a gong

Feels like a blessing, twice a moment.

Getting haphazard with exclamation points!

The days I wake up and though my body aches

It's not a sack of bones, but a pleasure machine!

The days it feels like I'm running a marathon

And folks have got signs with my face on 'em

I hear them cheer my name.

Woke up with a hole in my stomach,

Opened the fridge to half a tomato and a note

"Set this aside for you. Cherokee purple."

Say it with me

no blades no noose no split skulls

My dentist's been real proud of me

Flossing lately, because I've been thinking

I got enough time, enough sugar

To worry about my teeth rotting

And ain't that amazing?

Running up a hill, some man yelled at me

"There will come a day you can't do this,

Today is not that day!"

Day 16: Joshua Tree

Can't touch those Joshua trees
Those spiny trunks, desert daggers
That need a freeze before they bloom.

Can't slap an age on them without growth rings

The clouds rolled overhead easily

Casting shadows a mile wide

The boulders stacked themselves precariously

Like they could crush you any moment

It's customary to offer guests a beverage,

But she knows better than to be a good host

The desert's a better woman than me
She doesn't peacock for nothing
Just stretches out, rolls, yawns, grants permission

To be anything but young and fertile

To be ancient, vast, unknowable

To be the worst kind of woman,
The unsmiling kind, dry and unapologetic
A drought of a woman, inhospitable
An ungracious desert of a woman

She told me I could be the free like her

Day 15: Enigma

They say humans can smell petrichor

Better than sharks smell blood

That sounds about right, the way I pay attention

I can smell the rain, when my car's leaking oil

But my heartbeat materializes sometimes

From somewhere I can't locate

I figure love's an apparition, conjured from nothing

The second wind drawn from bleeding lungs

Pennies pulled from empty pockets

Feasting from scraps, 

Coast to coast with an empty tank

It's an impossibility, something without a last name

Born full-bodied like a horse

Love's a fighter with that big metal belt

Never trained a day