dicentra spectabilis

a world for bleeding-hearts.

[mournfulroses]

Edna St. Vincent Millay, from a poem titled "Interim," featured in The Complete Poems of Edna St. Vincent Millay

[ladyinabath]

As a girl I dreamed of being a warrior

[everestwritespoems]

I've Had Sex at the Trinity Site, I've Had Sex in Eden

We've been waiting for

Adam and Eve

since their names were first

thought of.

Your body was made by

nuclear fusion.

I see you in the first sparks of fire, and

I see you when the dust settles.

The air you touch

changes me.

What you give to me

can not be taken.

[ladyinabath]

I was the one sent away when someone was cruel to me.

Fits that I watched A Streetcar Named Desire (1951) in bed after I came home.

[ladyinabath]

Strawberry

When I was ten

someone told me

“Right now, your uterus

is the size of a small strawberry”.

I thought of red staining the tongue,

seeds scraping the bumps on its underside.

Today the memory came back all wrong

pacing along double-lines staining pink

as fruit on tissue left out too long.

Out of season, yet it is the size

of a strawberry.

I cry the way you cry

when you already know

what you have to do.

I fear this the way one is afraid of certain rooms.

It presses on that voice, that kitchen,

the calm cruelty of information

how easily they told me

what grows where.

I try with all I have not to imagine its roots.

think “this is my body” like a spell that works

if you say it a thousand times.

Somewhere, summer strawberries are being

washed, hulled, sugared, loved.

And people say

how small, how sweet,

how lucky.

[ladyinabath]

Tea-time

Baby? Pour a cup of tea for me-

lavender and belladonna, drift me off to sleep.

The only comfort left, my face against the steam,

warm is all that I want to be.

I was at the cliffside last night

a bit off-centre, but I promise I was alright.

Run a bath, I'm so cold, baby.

I'm glad I didn't give you a fright.

[ladyinabath]

lamprocapnos spectabilis (syn. Dicentra) = a bleeding-heart flower.

Some people call it a lady-in-a-bath, because if you pull the flower apart carefully enough, you can make a woman appear.

When I was pulled apart, I stitched my wounds closed into the shape of this flower.

I have spent years trying to decide which one I am.

-Dicentra