Rachel Gruskin
Two Poems
Breathing Reason
Memory is a destructive winter.
Breath. Breathing cold smoke and sanity.
The girls are born suspicious and then they let you.
Hush and breathe.Why do your bones lean left?
Where are the winters you’ve kept?
Breathing side by side,
Our reasons are naked cigarettes.
Breath. Breathing. Reasons, and
Lay Down.Memories are tattooed on our winter.
In wet ambivalence
You let him push under your bones.Girls sleep
With electric boys.
They’re just batteries and hair gel here.
And sanity is zipped up in a winter coat.
The Planetary Feminine
Stomping on my summer like a storm
Drops are white wine filled goblets
And break on nosesOnce I was a daughter
And I clung to dresses of someone taller
Once I was a mother, wrapping the world around my shoulders;
A coat made of water
Now a collective matriarch again,
I’m under
and of the ground.
