Once when the thunder was in the ground a girl was born and

her mother was a horse. She was given a name meaning Loyalty 

and rode away on the stallion’s back to the top of a mountain where 

they found love and desire had been torn apart and only one could be recovered.

I grew up where you walk in the grass, lie down 

in the clover. I saw the goat’s teeth pried 

open, felt the bit in the horse’s mouth, brass

and iron. Raising livestock forces practicality

on your devotion. When we own a body, 

the body can’t speak, when we own a body, 

the body can’t sleep. This is the measure 

of my calf: 38 centimeters, center of 

the ankle to the center of the knee.

I rode in the back of a bright winter sun afternoon

taxi, politely avoiding the eyes of the driver 

eying me. My head is a house with windows 

and a door, my face is a curtain to keep me warm.

“You should stay away from men,” he said. “They will 

only want you for your body.” In the broken silence I saw

them walking toward me on their weaponed feet,

shotgun hooves making a racket on the 

smooth sheets, my neck 14 inches between.

It doesn’t matter who’s an orphan when the

bodies are categorized – black white or red – 

lost found or dead. Beauty isn’t the body sold, 

beauty’s in the eye of the one who soldered the belt 

that holds you. Who sold the body first? Who 

owned the body to be sold? And if the violence is 

a side effect – if we only harm the thing we hold 

when insert-the-word turns into sex – then my skin 

sprouts bills that flake off me like fish scales loosened 

by the back of a spoon. And if I wake, I wake up crinkling.

Once the flower is cut from its stem, once I was a daughter in the kingdom of men.