Her name isn't Eve

She holds pale snake and bitten apple
like she's the first woman on earth like
the first time you tasted your own
blood like a child punished for hunger
but her name is not Eve

She bears the world on her shoulders
bent like a softer version of Atlas like
a thousand people have loved her and
left like ocean grinds down solid stone
but her name was never Eve

She carries light bulb promise in her hip
bones and your salt salvation in her thin
breasts like the name you always forget
like desire always finds a way to ground
but her name isn't Eve

She walks prickle footed and sunburn shy
with witchcraft in her hair and flint in her
chest for when they knife her, when she's cut
she will spark and scar you, she knows burn
but her name is never Eve

Still the girl

This week three men wanted me. My year turned on the hinge of their desire.

This is a language I understand. How it begins is how it ends.

My answer, three times.

I am not for you.

Don't they know I'm still the girl on the beach with thighs twelve years too large, flesh bulging against the chicken-wire gaze of her father and uncle? My bicycle dubbed the gate to acceptability, to shrinking those meaty fillets down to a size that might make me invisible to scorn.

I am not for you.

Don't they know I'm still the girl, fifteen with billboard breasts proclaiming the ripeness of my sex to every man that passed. Before I had learned how to open the long library vault of my mouth. How everyone in a foreign country thought I was my father's wife, in that daisy dress made for a church I no longer believed in?

I am not for you.

Don't they know I'm still the girl in the warehouse, far from home. Seventeen so green, not a colour a person should ever be. His twice-my-age fingers moved like vine tendrils, brushing my waist, tucking in the tag of my shirt. Into my body a tree trunk, like my sapling self had always belonged to him. Curled in my grandmother's shower with shame.

I am not for you.

Don't they know I am still the girl, twenty-one and never kissed. The first time, my teeth were bars and I did not want to unlock them. His kisses tasted like ash and held a key to the library he would never enter.

I am not for you.

Don't they know I'm still the girl twenty and eight, when moan was just a word and pleasure an idea. Whose virginity became a trophy she was tired of carrying, fox-weary of the steeplechase, the sniffing hounds. So threw it to a pale-fleshed creature who did not understand how twinned desire and fear can be.

I am not for you.

Don't they know I'm still the girl whose no turned limp, fell like a body in a waterfall when he pushed and pushed again. Drowned when he said it was my fault. Two years gone and I'm breathing again but the timber of my belly is still waterlogged.

I am not for you.

Don't they know, I'm still the girl with a canyon named father in her chest? With a trickle, a creek called love in that chasm signed man. With a bear in the belly of that canyon. She roars at all the strangers stumbling in. There is no haven in this body, this tree trunk is not home.

I am not for you.

To the men that wanted me this week, and the ones that are waiting for me next week and the ones after that.

You can't fill in my canyons with the soil of your masculinity. There isn't enough of you to make it solid ground again. Didn't anyone teach you how earthquakes work?

When it rains, sometimes the creek floods. Sometimes the canyon is full and love washes the stone ledges clean. There are always traces of earth left behind. Maybe we can plant a garden in the crevices together, grow something that hasn't been here before.

You can't fuck my history out of me, can't rescue me from fires that razed long before you arrived. I have not been waiting safe in a tower for you and your steed. I have not been waiting. I have not been safe.

Forests always grow back after fires.

We can't dance if you are always stepping forward. If you move in the only place I can breathe is away. Don't chase me into the canyon.

I am still the girl that dances on the Sabbath day. Dances at midnight. Twirls in her skirts and howls at the sickle moon.

This is a language I understand. How it begins is how it ends.

If I am for you, remember the girl. Learn her too. I am the bear and the canyon and the flood and still the girl.

Bloody

There is poetry in my
body but I can't get it out
it fills my thirsty veins
pushes through the chambers
of my livid heart, gives me
headaches when I sleep
the only way
to get it out is to break
the skin

I have spent the
time since you healing these
canyon wounds and the scars
make a landscape of my flesh
like ink bleeding into
paper they tell stories holding in
memory long as mountains

Yet my blood sings to
be freed again to be seen
who will pierce me next to
hear its siren call, the bloody
thump of my tireless heart?
will they leave me stained
with my own carmine poetry
or join their eager blood with mine?

Thoughts after a yoga class

It is not for the strangers who have told me
that the icecream I eat in public
will go straight to my hips. Or the
old man at a train station
who told me
     just the other day
that I should exercise instead of
standing still on an escalator.

It is not so I can
get a better summer body
in just thirty days for
one easy payment of -
      My body is FINE

It is not for the man who
got aroused when he discovered
I could do the splits while I was drunk
and later wouldn't pay attention
when I tried to move out
from underneath him, until I pushed. Or the
one who said - before he'd even met me
that he would pay
anything to watch me do it.

It is not for the men who think
my dancing is for their titillation, not for
the ones who like to watch. It is not
to emphasise the way my waist
curves into my hip so that men
can want me harder and straight-waisted women can 

throw their acid envy in my face.

It is not for the people
who can only compliment me
about my body when I have whittled
down my flesh to less
than it was
when we last met.

I go to yoga to find the peace of mind that this world so often steals from me.

I go to yoga for the sensation of breathing in time
with a room full of strangers
in a city where there are so many people that they cannot even see me

I go to yoga to discover with childlike delight and entirely 

adult pride that my body can do things I did not know a body could do.

I go to to yoga to remember that my body feels good to live in.

To remember that my body is entirely mine.