after Sylvia Plath and Władysław Podkowiński
Hey horse, hey friend,
I like chrysalises. We need more tenderness,
not less. Emerging from a foreign field,
my neck in your arms. Pale arms, holding a black-berried set
of eyes, holding me. I loved you,
loved you further than the recesses of myself into
my melanin. Hey horse,
stagger me downwards with a blacker blackness.
Event horizon me. Pupil me. Flat-and-sharp-key
me. Eyelid me before the opening of
an aubade. To die pretty as lace: these poppies
re-engineered for an imagination beneath my
shirt. I skirt around this handling of my body
of me, tonguing so sweetly, my hair. I curl for you with a largesse
unheard of by my ancestors. And I cannot resent
the woman I love. The woman I love
will touch my hair. My hair will
touch myself when the light spills open,
fresh as the disaster of lungs. To speak with the certainty of
your fingers pulling out my tongue. The snow outside
and the shadows of ourselves against the walls—
nothing here is racial. Only our usual pleasure
igniting itself into another pale exultation of
unborn children. Divine me. It will only make me feel
more real to know the pain of your mind,
thinking somewhere, riding into another red sun
not imagined by me. Still, the indefatigable hooves beat
only for every other woman who has loved me, beat
only for you as I have made you here. And another horse
on this horizon, holding me as myself, inking itself
into dawn. I am alive. Pretty.