In photographs
The ladies scream or laugh
It’s hard to tell.
Heads back they bare their teeth
In agonies of joy or rage
Or grief; it’s hard to tell.
All that remains of them
Withered icons growing ever dim.
Choosing’s painful; being chosen’s
Worse. Some lop the juice
First spurt and say that’s tastiest;
Some hesitate forever
As the vessel
Guards its drops, fearing
Time itself must have a stop.
Our language reeks of stops and cuts;
We have no other way to think –
Like dancers frozen
At the brink of freedom
Paralyzed abreast the arc
we cannot see
what this design was meant to be.
In that first winter
When they thought the world was dead –
Dogs cried; devils laughed.
Crystal splintered up in shafts.
We met in tents, a feathered
Rendezvous
Touched and yearned and
Parley-voused
Till you were me and
I was you.
Somewhere a fetus twists and jerks
Assemblage of dynastic quirks.
For kingdom come from nothing came.
Our world is born
To bleed again.
Alysse Aallyn 