My Body Resigns

The marksman laces a target
into his vision like my mother threads 
her quilting needle; he points his bow, 
unsilences his gun. I am in the center; 
no, my body is centered, though erring, 
lilting in its thoughts from left to right,
from earth to cosmos; my body, 
a dancing diary, a bluster of cells; 
how it has bled for years, how it has served;
how punished for the apple I offered,
for the pomegranate I ate; for the lives
I’ve birthed, for the hundreds more I’ve denied;
for the divine light and lack thereof; 
for the answers it gives; holy/unholy; 
especially its wisdom screaming 
from my opened-and-closed hips; 
especially its solitude-dreams;
this is how women are veiled; how disappeared
how silenced; we who sow and sing and sew,
denied our hunger, we are massaged, 
we are messaged; as they cock their triggers,
we hobble; we fall and call it nesting; 
we brace our bodies while gathering 
food for the hunters; we miracle nothing to plenty;
we who create feast after feast; 
who do all the holding, are never held.

Catherine Esposito Prescott is the author of Accidental Garden, winner of the Barry Spacks Poetry Prize (Gunpowder Press, 2023), and the Co-Founder and Editor-in-Chief of SWWIM Every Day. Recent poems appear or are forthcoming in Colorado Review, Josephine QuarterlyNELLENorthwest Review, and Valparaiso Poetry Review. She holds an MFA from NYU.

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