ayaMMaya

One early evening of May

I found my feet skip through familiar streets

There were lamp posts, vehicles and houses

That called out to my yearning heart

Curbs went across each other, grass grew

The setting sun mixing purple and orange

Threads of memory shaped my happy mood

…
I thought of someone that once brought me here

How his face has turned away from mine

A great shadow of absence took his place

The last impression he made

Were the scars inside me, beyond reach

His mouth was where I remembered myself

The smile, the grin and the kisses lost to the sun

In my house I mirror what I tried to correct

But that night, I measured my wit and strength

The curves above my lips were upward

I know my heart was still smelling flowers
.

…

There is a place in the heart that will never be filled, a space, and even during the best moments and the greatest times, we will know it. We will know it more than ever. There is a place in the heart that will never be filled and we will wait, and wait in that space.

“In the dairy industry, artificial insemination has been the norm for at least twenty-five years. Cows and bulls in this country almost never get to do it the old-fashioned way—farmers buy semen from the best bulls in the country, then often take it even further, flushing the ovaries of their best cows, doing in vitro fertilization and implanting sibling embryos into a bunch of unrelated surrogates.

When I was maybe fifteen, I got to help inseminate a Holstein. We herded her into a small V-shaped enclosure. Don, the cute young farm manager, pulled on a shoulder-length latex glove and threaded a long catheter into the cow as she struggled vainly to get away. I got to man the syringe and pull the trigger. Yep, knocked up a cow. Nice claim to fame for a city girl.

So, about twenty-five years later, there I was in the stirrups as the doctor pulled on latex gloves and started threading a long plastic tube into my uterus.

“I feel like a cow!” I whined to Dr. Kelly, and explained why. She laughed. “Actually, most of our technology does come from the dairy industry.”

Tell me about it. Moo.”

“We die containing a richness of lovers and tribes, tastes we have swallowed, bodies we have plunged into and swum up as if rivers of wisdom, characters we have climbed into as if trees, fears we have hidden in as if caves. I wish for all this to be marked on my body when I am dead. I believe in such cartography — to be marked by nature, not just to label ourselves on a map like the names of rich men and women on buildings. We are communal histories, communal books. We are not owned or monogamous in our taste or experience. All I desired was to walk upon such an earth that had no maps.”

by E. E. Cummings

somewhere i have never travelled, gladly beyond
any experience, your eyes have their silence:
in your most frail gesture are things which enclose me,
or which i cannot touch because they are too near

your slightest look easily will unclose me
though i have closed myself as fingers,
you open always petal by petal myself as Spring opens
(touching skilfully, mysteriously) her first rose

or if your wish be to close me, i and
my life will shut very beautifully, suddenly,
as when the heart of this flower imagines
the snow carefully everywhere descending;

nothing which we are to perceive in this world equals
the power of your intense fragility: whose texture
compels me with the color of its countries,
rendering death and forever with each breathing

(i do not know what it is about you that closes
and opens; only something in me understands
the voice of your eyes is deeper than all roses)
nobody, not even the rain,has such small hands