after Ocean Vuong "Then the Lord God used the rib from the man to make a woman, and then he brought the woman to the man." — Genesis 2:22 You need to believe it was for the love and not its opposite. For to love is to hold your heart outside your body and inside another, the red echo pulsing through your marrow to sound what cannot be heard. ~ You, pulled through the bones by his desire, You, your clay self molded into the shape fitting his desires. ~ this is how we make the mistakes our children inherit how, that first night the man returns clutching his weapons baptized in the bones & the blood of the animals whose care you are tasked with & the man holds you down & he — & you stay because you were made to honor & obey & you both know the man will do it again & he does & you stay. ~ And the one in your belly you do not yet know exists is already learning there are only two choices: predator and prey. ~ See red. See nothing. Swollen, his sweat dripped into your slitted eyes, hold onto the sting of his salt against your skin and know we will be legion in the iterations of the becoming through your belly — we are the belly of the belly, repeated, infinite; formed in the vast blackness of space, wombed bones stuttered into being like stars. ~ Night, always: his arrival; pulse, racing. Run. ~ In the wanting to be safe was believing the first man who said his body would stand between the world and yours like your god promised when gifting you left anyway to stand alone before serpentined satan & evicted body swelled with child you would have understood his curse was not in the pain of birth but for us your daughters in line with another & the next it would be this singular weight this rib of unboned promise now separate to bear the ripping apart of the act of creation alone because what is written inside the body cannot be denied. ~ And perhaps, the anger was not in the failed test of the apple, but that in giving you the act of creation you were made his equal, not the man. ~ But how in the breaking everything you gave will be used against you. ~ But why would love set up love to fail? ~ And if there is no memory of before violence was learned as love, there is only the sounding of how, long before this baby is a wish inside your body there will be no warning to know how others, much later will seek out this cracking sounding of the fault lines in our bones with the careful deliberation of a stormed wind moving across not just the waters, sand or mud but the hardest, deepest rock to shatter further and destroy.

Glass: A Journal of Poetry is published monthly by Glass Poetry Press.
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