by Sandra Crouch

Thirst is such a simple thing
to heal. Two hands
cupped toward one another
the wine-rich drink of earth
the way it felt to swim
wildly alive.

In the ship of your body
the soul misses the holy bruise
blue from that army of blood
rushing to the wound's side
erasing your sharp edges
softening—

Our veins are absolutely strings
and a fire's struck hiss
in heaps of tender slack.
But the heart is just a muscle
parked beneath the highway overpass
biting her lip.
Fibrillating memory
filled with the amniotic of our own awe.

The earth is just rotating on its axis,
her body a parenthesis
with midwifery hands.
She is tired, tired in the marrow of her bones
spun out into the dark.
But no one heals what they refuse to look at.
Fever is how the body prays, how it burns
as if you were its keeper, not its ghost.

Send the throat stone down.
Be the body breaking everything else open
as a tongue between the teeth.
Night is a mouth, hungry and endless
beyond the mapped world
calling from our porch to come look at the sky.

Come 'round, come whether-or-not
this is a life without sunrise.
Come lightning strike,
there's nothing to be done but turn and praise.
Come undone, come falling apart
clutched close in earth's dun fist.

Let night whisper into the hull
of your ear, the wound still your mouth
bringing it into being,
longing to be whole as a body.
Between every form and its arc
is the sound of the beginning
held taut in the sweetening air.

Braided Cento:
Jen Stewart Fueston, Madonna, Complex, Cascade Books, 2020
Andrea Gibson, Lord of the Butterflies, Button Poetry, 2018
Jennifer K. Sweeney, Foxlogic Fireweed, The Backwaters Press, 2020

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Sandra Crouch, MA, is a poet, artist, and letterpress printer recently transplanted to Nashville, Tennessee. Her work has been published in HAD, MER Literary, Rogue Agent, Rust+Moth, West Trestle Review, and elsewhere. You can follow along at https://sandracrouch.com.