now I'm blinking in a new gloamingand all I see as I'm stretched low down hereis a world of women flat on their frozenfaces. we are the ground itself, corporealcarpet of cells, softness calloused hardbeneath the pebbled soles of the fathersand husbands and brothers and priestsand it's a horror if you could see it,a world of women ruinedby man's fear.

i feel the spring breeze rufflingthe new-hatched damp of my unfurlingfeathers; i see with eyes bleary from egg-darkthe shell clinging sticky to my screamingbeak.

we have forgotten that we were bornof celestial cataclysm.we have forgotten how to dancebare-footed on the earth to the cadenceof our souls. we have forgotten the ritualfires and the acrid tang of holy smokeon our tongues.

you saywe were nevermeant for this vowed life,golden bands of only us, and deathdo us part. you say love like it's held in quotation marks,that this union soured before it started.

I am at the gates of my own destruction.(Or so I'm told.)

the mind is a treasuretrove, an almanac, a tomb.

I stand in my own power now, the questions of permission that I used to choke on for my every meal now dead in a fallen heap, and when they tell me that I will fall, I nod. I will fall, I reply, and my words are a whispermy words are a howlI will fall , I say, and the tumbling will be all my own. The skinned palms and oozing knees are holy wounds, stigmata of my She. I will catch my own spilled blood, and not a drop will be wasted.

do you dare to step in-to the vulnerable black, stripped to the soul with human blindness – when the full and weeping moon steps from the shade of a tumult of mountains – when, in the fragrant dim, day's tree stump transformsinto some nether-worldly other – when time's skin is thin and you arebared – when there is nothing between you and the Wildest Onewhose name is your own?

I wonder what freezesthe flurry of hurt on her cold-flushed cheeks, if his touch isa salve or the shattering.

absencelooks like a lake bed flooded with skysounds like cotton howlingtastes like tear-stained pillowssmells like churning bile and burnt hairfeels like screaming agony, my heart dying and dying