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.

U.S. Surgeon General Declares Gun Violence a Public Health Crisis,
With Fatal Impact on Women
[19th News]

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