My Body, Your Choice
Chromatic prism, ultraviolet light
waves toward my flat black pupil
a record
shuffling the same few songs.
Isn’t that what womanness has been about?
Repeated scenes:
the bonnet-donned bonnie
forking at the hay bail
the fish wife catching
her baby born under the stall
the silken onion skin
of the matron’s hands
as she uses a needle to connect
loop after loop.
“Our own” rotating square of green or taupe, mist, ash,
tobacco, brick, ultramarine, coal, pitch, straw–
is a boundary–tethered by the leather strings
of a coin purse held in someone else’s name.
The record changes its vessel:
cassette-compact disc-digital-multimedia.
A teen is taken
on a hill of quilted covers
the administrative assistant
pumps milk at her desk
a woman with a coif like a dollop of cream
greets you at WalMart.
Can anyone stammer blame if we wish
to pluck out our eyes like grapes?
Scratch, dent, break the cruel circle over our knee
Jessie Wingate
Jessie is a florist by day, poet by night, and round-the-clock mom living on unceded Ohlone land in California. She holds an MA in Art History. Her work has been published or is forthcoming in F(r)iction, CALYX, Chestnut Review, Mother Mag, California Quarterly, Kestrel, The Berkeley Poetry Review, The Bold Italic, and others.
