Nature’s Wrath
Oh my God, my soul!
That’s it.
Just a young-yeared brown girl
banging her pelvis against a white window ledge
at the sight of an approaching storm
that pays her many minds with all his eyes.
She don’t know,
this is going to be her whole life.
I shriek.
I always shriek.
The welling of electrical charge,
the spine a lightning rod
pure silver and cervix
the most conductive.
A too-skinny fawn panting
for water, a temptation
to drink the milkweed sap
its drool made only
for the monarchs.
But,
I am not a delicate thing.
If a blossom, I’m the kind you
rub against your mouth,
your eyelids
then you burst in
jiggling blisters.
Are you hearing this?
The main bolt will go back up into the cloud,
will heat the air,
become the sound we hear,
turn me on.
This deep that calls unto deep
this yelling, always yelling
makes fissures in the riverbed
I’ll eat all the fishies.
I’ll save them all
like I’m saving myself for a marriage
to someone who will let me sleep
in their long hair
or for a word that isn’t about human
suffering, but my hair
is too coarse to braid with the thunder’s
I’ll scrape his cheek,
I’ll scrape all your cheeks!
I overheard the mothers complaining
to their pastors that I touched their sons
too much.
They wouldn’t let me in the room
to talk about my own brewing
my own gathering winds
my own exposure of leaf underbelly.
The drips that splattered their daughters
they liked it so much.
So I stepped out of the window
and became a sweet, fleshy hurricane.
No more to embarrass my mother
be tamed.
Oh my God, I’m hungry!
I only have this one more moment of youth,
of an excuse for squabbling with my extending
bones. I am already root.
I am already turnip.
I cannot protect this cream alone
and I won’t.
I will surface and purple and know
they will try to consume me.
But
they can’t.
The way purblind is a half-truth
I am the half-breed comprised
of what you can’t see and what you know
to be good.
If you define what’s good by how it feels
then I must be good,
so, so, good.
I look around and no one is guarding
my body, this trickle of lava
licking up everything in my path.
No one can stop my shriek.
I always shriek
like a hungry little animal.