that opens me from the top
by the language’s body, where
the blood eclipse we don’t talk about
is calendar-event beautiful
(woman hood or hooded woman),
preceding the labor of being read
as bodily and I am everyone’s garden,
using the heart reaction
for a petrifying romance
between feet and ground and hum.
love me because you don’t have to
and extract the patterns, I’ll make
capsules to ingest twice weekly.
take my crescent cycles
to the supermarket with the coupons.
discount my flying spells or
wait until I’ve boiled and cooled
and crafted the earth to stretch
for us and us-plus and really just me
being able to breathe.
you can love me, you don’t have to,
you can close me from the end.
Samantha Duncan is the author of four poetry chapbooks, including Playing One on TV (Hyacinth Girl Press, 2018) and The Birth Creatures (Agape Editions, 2016), and her work has recently appeared in BOAAT, SWWIM, Kissing Dynamite, Meridian, and The Pinch. She is an Assistant Editor for Borderlands: Texas Poetry Review and lives in Houston.
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