Pleurotomaria, and: The First Water

Abstract

Pleurotomaria, and: The First Water M. K. Foster (bio) Keywords poetry, M. K. Foster, silence, womanhood, marriage, transformation, fire, ice, light, music, sound, religion, body, violence, flood, birth, death PLEUROTOMARIA a woman turns to salt and silence, a woman turns to ice and blindness and niceness the way a woman turns to drying hyacinths hung and strung upside-down at the window as a woman turns to trying, turns to pressing, turns to portrait after portrait hanging above a fire of a woman turning into fire by telling it her name height sex age weight (for real, no rounding) which is all just: a woman saying to herself (so saying to no one) if I marry him, some part of my face will never be the same, ruined and stained in a way that’s not stated, but seen as a thing to be unseen when: a woman turns to gleaming, a woman turns to mirrors to pluck out chin whiskers and grey hair to floss her fangs: is all there is, all it comes down to for a woman made of bones made of women made of broken bones, no children, bad joints, and run-away juice, which is all we’re looking at when a woman turns to ‘two pigs fighting under a blanket’ because a woman is a turning-into; and it’s chronic and largely incurable, this condition because being a woman is a condition, a user agreement term, and a state of existence all at the same time (and who says women are bad multitaskers?) because (try it sometime!) you try having an origin story where you’re made of sleep and rib, you try getting sucked into thinking you were born to suck and suck at it, because, if she is nothing else, a woman is changing, making change a woman turning into a bird turning into a god: a god who turns her face to the sun as into oncoming traffic and lifts her gaze to make eye contact with whatever’s followed her down an alley, past a dumpster; and she is both: the alley and the dumpster; so she turns and she turns, because turning is womaning, they finally learn when it’s a woman’s turn: hiking up her skin, unpinning her jaw, and showing all the volcanic knives she hides by day behind her face and grinds each night against it’s fine it’s fine I’m fine, is a woman holding herself stiller than a pillar of salt with crimson lipstick; and holding, and holding: carnivorous, breathless, raw with wanting, waiting, preying for bitch would it kill you to smile [End Page 57] THE FIRST WATER what else is there to say?all night we held down the light— until it split us like old ice at dawn— thaw by another name— the large magellanic music of cracking and gasping, gnashingand almighty crashing filling us as divine sacrifice is said to fill— no, flood the body— or something like that: they say if you’re doing it right, god comes in your heart—and maybe that’s where I’ve been going wrong all along: here I am thinking it’s about holiness and shit, when really it’s just another man who thinks he’s god so hardhe won’t even let you look at him unless you’re on your knees— figures. what else is there to do after all this? what good is it to have the body that matters and matterswhen it’s just another heap of meat good for nothingbut getting fucked or shot? there is nothing anyone can say— all night: we broke like flood water tossed on rocksbreaks like the waking of birth in a woman: a dying to be alive— or else, heaved hot and high through black winter air, becoming ice as it arcs and ends, and we were the air and the flood—until: a soundlike god breaking every bone in your body so you can’t run from his love— and we became that sound: [End Page 58] M. K. Foster m.k. foster is a poet, gothic horror writer...