After the summer’s geography
of bodies, you are ribbed
seashell
stripped to moonlight,
mistaken for nautilus,
the antediluvian
Venus carved from her own bone.
Those tight-lipped mammary
cells abandoned, sour
milk in the sand, hot oceans
to undress in, and all
my fantasies buxom.
When the waves split
their tongues, I lie naked
in the surf and wait
for a second adolescence;
for bud-tipped breasts
to unearth
miniatures of mountain—
bluff, bulwark, weathered
arches carved teat to teat.
This is what’s left of God’s clay,
the unmolded archetype,
a female animal
undone, her gills turned to lungs
and set to walk upright
in the waning flood.
Those who see you will say prairie,
but you are hearth. They say empty,
but I say flower—
all petal, pistil, stem of you
bursting for touch.
Jennifer Greenberg is a Floridian poet living in New England, and an associate editor for the South Florida Poetry Journal. Her writing appears in several online publications and was awarded the Joe Bolton Poetry Award in 2020.
Welcome to SWWIM Every Day’s National Poetry Month project: Sing the Body: A Collection of Poems Praising Our Selves!
With support from Florida International University’s Wolfsonian Public Humanities Lab (WPHL) and Florida International University’s Center for Women and Gender Studies, we are publishing poems that celebrate body positivity and our selves.
In addition to publishing the poems as poems of the day, 10 select Sing the Body poems will be displayed on FIU’s main campus near mirrors and places where women encounter themselves. These poems will live in a dedicated portfolio on our website.
Thank you, as always, for reading and supporting SWWIM Every Day! Happy National Poetry Month!
