History of Milk
Monica Ojeda
poems about milk
[Opening Epilogue] [Ripe falls the fruit which in flaming verb licked its ribs under the sun; more than 365 summers of its flesh in black constellated bonego slack
Over the arched skin of poppies rolls the fruitIt splits open
From its epicenter is born a scythe like a steel eyelid closing in the baptismal mist from its immersion
“This is the first thing you’ll see,” declares the branch stripped of its weighty head, “before you cross autumn’s fissure”]
[from Section II: I Killed My Sister Mabel] Cut the branch with your serrated tongue, Madonna of the Saw, as if it were the prodigal thread of our lives and you a kind of Mother Grim Reaper amid the putrid dawn rocking its breast like a pendulum over my mouth An artery bursts gleaming against the crystals of your eyesDo you want to pain me out in the weather, throw your girl’s rigor mortis to my lips moaning the lesser morning?
Her death was the color of God and of dusks in scorched water Those skies were her body in livor mortis: you’ve no idea what kind of paradise it scrapes in dying! But your shadow pulses a justice of tree-times:it’s a sore that concentrates the pain of religions, sacrifice crossing the history of milk and the memories that strangle mystery
I’ve found wool hanging from your August branches I’ve tried to function like a fruit whose blood every inch of the landscape has drunkMother, you’ve abandoned me, but you were right to do so: I killed your baby
The scorpions of Raguna grew in my mind each time I licked your liquid nipples of shredded hours Now its stingers are hidden in the face of the herd of your revenge They’re planning a hygienic murder Madonna of the Machete, hear my senses: Raguna will never be the same after the whirlwind in your muscles Unsexmehere, I begged the holy void when I crossed your girl’s trachea with the dagger of my desire A true creation Unsexmehere and from her life the red cosmos sprouted submerging me in endless delight[Pleasure is the discovery of violence, I murmured against the pubis of her algor mortis]
In the baroque depths of flesh that ceases its beating I found the offal of the universe aflame: destruction is creation, therefore the continuity in ashes regardless of their depth Unsexmehere, Mother: your flesh rubs my reborn spirit The verb dissolves like ice on which you urinate beyond my sight Destruction is creation Look at everything that grows in Mabel’s corpse:look at the hydrangeas, the worms, the one-winged condor sweeping the luno foxes from her belly
Her design melts from the heat of my design rising, powerful, like the fist of a slave, above the flies that eat her and make love to her in mid-air Open your eyes and look at everything that grows in Mabel’s death: under her nails rhinoceros bulls are fighting and ripping the fabrics of my heart I bring her nails to my ear like seashells and listen to the sea charring the lubricity of the bats Look at everything that grows in her perfect silence: mirages in the dance of the Areopagus Only that which you enter to die is rebornDestruction is creation
[A break in the poetic discourse: according to science, murder implies a material change; religions preach that to kill is to transcend the body towards the subsoil; art immortalizes the urge to do away with the other by rummaging around in the x-ray of a shaken breath; but killing is neither descent nor ascent, not study, but revelation of the course of a cleansing waterfall]
Look at everything my naked strength lets loose over Mabel: her organs rain torrential like an apparition illuminating my hut. They’re miniature gardens brimming with silence and within the silence sown by her heels I wonder: Did she think this was hate? Her final cries sculpted my hands to leave me a message of her pain at leaving Did she think, as I shaped my knuckles against her flesh, that it was hate? Her goodbye left little gardens in my fingers A mist warms my face when I caress her wound like an animal in fright: Did she understand that cleaving her was a gesture of cleansing for love? I showed her my naked strength as I wept from beauty On a night of sun she let herself wane to show me the scent of blood flashing me smiles of sunsets to come I watered the inside of your girl over my white heart, but, Mama, I can only love her as she rots over the oranges in my breakfast I gift you the music of her decomposition I manufactured a crime with no body: her infection is an eye forever floating in your heavens▼
We played with cold buttons on your still-fertile eyelids in spring; buttons so round as to be snatched from God’s glacial clothing
You stayed so still you looked like a rock in the middle of time. “Some pieces can’t be swallowed: never take them into your thoughts,” said our mother raising the book of abysses over your head and mine: two monoliths kissing at the edge of the ravine in Raguna
The beginning was that magnificent giraffe you climbed to scale my shadow: braiding messianic events and broken swings from our childhood
Instinct made me press your syllables into hurling molerattle moans [a language of tenderness in astral orgasm] every night in front of your withering bonfire
This is the way we sang the world while blind mice slept on your pillow. We fed them descriptions of Mama’s belly and measured the differences between your name and my name
[Only what began is ripe fruit]
▼
You opened your legs engulfed in my shadow
We laced fingers so often in the dark that we grew a memory of fire from our flesh in Lascaux. Its quaking image lit the ruins where you would sleep for days in the poem’s beastly drifting
Knowledge of that experience was a meadow of absurd toys: a sharp-edged intuition of the nature that examines the size of the first gestures on stone
As you painted the inner emptiness of the waters, my shadow’s universe expanded with your engulfed body falling asleep from ice
Back then you counted galaxies with your eyes closed and had nightmares with your eyes open
The condors were the only breath of God crashing into the ocean’s unceasing fire
Remember the sight of their wings like razors in the water?
Your smile was my smile and belonged to me like the singular event of your footsteps over my body sprawled in a stellar season
You were walking on me like someone dead and sexless and from that apparent neutrality you edged away and announced that I would kill you
Mabel, when you were little you asked me:
“Do you like the taste of blood?”
“I do. It tastes like language,” I answered
You looked towards the ocean’s horizon scorching
“Pain has a scent like blood. That’s why I have to be the one to walk on you like someone dead and sexless”
Blind mice were sleeping on your pillow as I asked:
“Sissie, please, lil sis: close your legs engulfed in my shadow”
And you said to me:
“Some sun-filled night you will water my blood to make poppies sprout in my name”
“Will I weep from beauty?”
“You will weep from beauty”
