Bodies

My voice is stretched thin like peach skin that splits open at the sight of teeth,

I think of our bodies like a plural form of the infant Moses roving down the soft plateaus and dipping down caves of water,

of river.

Yet I know I cannot palliate the offense with the sentimentalizing of the medium that which carries it;

nothing can abate the way that men can discern another person as nothing but the skin that delineates it,

the way they take stance upon our spines, spurring us down the river with their clubs,

wood carved out of our mother’s bellies, swallowed by men, digested, until apathetic they spat us back out a shivering, cyanotic baby born,

a baby born too old, knowing too great of ache before its first birthday;

the finger to the lips, the written notes, in that moment of realizing the society is dystopic.

I know we are precisely bodies to them, peach skins with the root dug out,

bobbing like fishing tassels down the river, they do not know the weight of our silent screams;

in the distance, you can still hear the mothers grieve;

they weep every autumn for the funeral procession of logs,

for the cortege of oak caskets crammed with bodies, and an amorphous note crying limited investigation for the man didn’t have the propriety to leave the soul intact,

it was too burned they said, fingerprints, dental records are no match to a man’s prowess in dehumanizing a woman and apologizing with gasoline.

Jochebed did not sacrifice her son to the river for a life of the nonessential,

but because like all women she knew it is better to confront the river and drown then to become another tally mark, another body, another conquer under the hands of men,

to be written down in a statistic book by men, to be pleasured and consumed off of by men;

if she, if I was going to die,

we would go down by going up, by building ourselves a dam out of our bodies,

the water levels swelling in the name of mutiny and every woman who has ever suffered,

these men will drown choking on our coffins,

their throats splintered open just enough 
to taste the gasoline.

-anna sluder