girl, self-determined

i want to be that lone songbird first to know it’s morning

to prophesy the sky’s fall sans a single storm cloud

or the divining rod of a coxswain. o dim sinnery

of the underworld, disinherit this my reproductive meat,

my intravenous morphine stream, hooked on histrionics

and the will to grow new wings. with this slice of the knife

between the knees i prune back all the moody brutes

i have no room to humor anymore, the briny brood

of porcelain insects and egg sacs demanding ransom

or else threatening to turn blue–what hubris it must take,

they’ll say, to play god under the shade of a replacement

palisade, to adopt a different name, saving invasive species

in a vase to later plant in spades. during the surgery

the doctors see there is a river flowing inside of me

insisting i never swim the same self twice

eclipsing literal cells with a figurative sea-swell

in which the river’s telos tells me, don’t turn back

i am but a toady ocean, you the infidel