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 Quarterly, NELLE, Northwest Review, and Valparaiso Poetry Review. She holds an MFA from NYU.
