The Mirror

"I only remember the onion, the egg and the boy.  O that was me, said the madman."   — Nicholas Moore  1 "I bite into an apple & then get bored before the second bite," you said. You were also Samson. I had cut your hair & locked you up. Besides, your room was bugged.  A former inmate left his muse  spread-eagled on the picture window.  In the glinting late-day sun we saw her huge & cross-eyed breasts appear diamond-etched against the slums of Harlem. You tongued your pills & cursed the residents. You called me Judas. You forgot I was a girl. 2 Your hands weren't birds. To call them birds would be too easy They drew circles around your ideas & your ideas were sometimes parabolas. That sudden Sunday you awoke & found yourself behind the looking glass your hands perched on the breakfast table waiting for a sign. I had nothing to tell them. They conversed with the eggs. ...

Deaths & betrayals, a friend having her breasts cut off, a friend having his heart re-wired, a husband lying, a lover never writing, & all this in the middle of May. I walk out in the green wind of Spring. The air whistles at my calves like silk stockings— my grandmother's silk stockings kept in a drawer— & whispering songs of the twenties. My breasts ache, my heart skips over cracks, my womb pulls earthward with its heavy blood. I seem to be attached to those I love by chains of flesh. Perhaps the mind lacks empathy enough; the body has to bleed as well.                         ☙ I can't imagine them cutting you apart— I with my endless dreams of torture, who lay awake nights with my eyelids screaming all childhood long. I never saw your breasts yet I can't imagine you without them. All week I have been fondling my nipples, hal...

                                                                                                     Mary Wollstonecraft Godwin                                                               ...