Once, my body was the Red Sea,
and I was Moses, only Moses was
a woman and she screamed into the water,
and it split unilaterally. From her
midline she pulled with an arm, not a staff,
the head of humanity. She cradled the warm,
red life with intention—the way
a midwife feels for the cliff of fundus. And then
the waters closed. There was the salty
expanse of sea—they were on
it, not in it, and her body was bread. Was Jesus
the myth of a woman who softened under
the delicious, pink, wet pallet of life,
in the milky ocean of saliva? We have
drifted the slow evolution to the shore. Where
the child faces me
before drinking me into herself.
