These Hands, If Not Gods - Natlie Diaz

Sainte Genevieve - Kiki Smith

Haven’t they moved like rivers—
like Glory, like light—
over the seven days of your body?

And wasn’t that good?
Them at your hips—

isn’t this what God felt when he pressed together
the first Beloved: Everything.
Fever. Vapor. Atman. Pulsus. Finally,
a sin worth hurting for. Finally, a sweet, a
You are mine.

It is hard not to have faith in this:
from the blue-brown clay of night
these two potters crushed and smoothed you
into being—grind, then curve—built your form up—

atlas of bone, fields of muscle,
one breast a fig tree, the other a nightingale,
both Morning and Evening.

O, the beautiful making they do—
of trigger and carve, suffering and stars—

Aren’t they, too, the dark carpenters
of your small church? Have they not burned
on the altar of your belly, eaten the bread
of your thighs, broke you to wine, to ichor,
to nectareous feast?

Haven’t they riveted your wrists, haven’t they
had you at your knees?

And when these hands touched your throat,
showed you how to take the apple and the rib,
how to slip a thumb into your mouth and taste it all,
didn’t you sing out their ninety-nine names—

Zahir, Aleph, Hands-time-seven,
Sphinx, Leonids, locomotura,
Rubidium, August, and September—
And when you cried out, O, Prometheans,
didn’t they bring fire?

These hands, if not gods, then why
when you have come to me, and I have returned you
to that from which you came—bright mud, mineral-salt—
why then do you whisper O, my Hecatonchire. My Centimani.
My hundred-handed one?

-----------
I wonder what my own dark carpenters, bulders of my small church, think of their creation. And further, who is the hundred-handed one who will overthrow them?

from People Close to You - Crystal Williams

Two Heads - Jenny Mendes

I.

She asks if she can sit on the bench &; it is that kind of day in Santa Monica, slow & gentle so that when she sits, properly, like a teacher or the pudgy mother of a girl named Marilyn, in unison you raise your round faces. The wind hefts the voices of your deadlings. They are serious &; sorrowful women, full of warnings, but today seem content to let you be, saying only, Child, be thankful, open your chest, that great cavern, to our other sister. & so you watch the sea. Who knows what the woman beside you hears: there are so many languages in the world & your tongue is tied to this one. So you sip iced tea &; lean a bit forward into them, your gone women, your sages, who seem to be stroking your head. You begin to imagine the ocean floor as a cup, the pouty lips of God, the soft foam, the salt as if food, tasting sweet &; clear. *** I heard Williams read at a writing conference years ago and was so moved I fled the auditorium before the lights came up so that no one would see me weep - as in the first stage of the ugly cry.  If she comes to your town, go hear her read. Bring tissues. And sunglasses.

What is Broken is What God Blesses - Jimmy Santiago Baca

Hurt - Cheyenne Randall

   The lover's footprint in the sand
   the ten-year-old kid's bare feet
in the mud picking chili for rich growers,
not those seeking cultural or ethnic roots,
but those whose roots
have been exposed, hacked, dug up and burned
   and in those roots
   do animals burrow for warmth;
what is broken is blessed,
 not the knowledge and empty-shelled wisdom
 paraphrased from textbooks,
  not the mimicking nor plaques of distinction
  nor the ribbons and medals
but after the privileged carriage has passed
 the breeze blows traces of wheel ruts away
 and on the dust will again be the people's broken
       footprints.
What is broken God blesses,
 not the perfectly brick-on-brick prison
 but the shattered wall
 that announces freedom to the world,
proclaims the irascible spirit of the human
rebelling against lies, against betrayal,
against taking what is not deserved;
 the human complaint is what God blesses,
 our impoverished dirt roads filled with cripples,
what is broken is baptized,
 the irreverent disbeliever,
 the addict's arm seamed with needle marks
  is a thread line of a blanket
 frayed and bare from keeping the man warm.
We are all broken ornaments,
  glinting in our worn-out work gloves,
  foreclosed homes, ruined marriages,
from which shimmer our lives in their deepest truths,
blood from the wound,
    broken ornaments—
when we lost our perfection and honored our imperfect sentiments, we were
blessed.
Broken are the ghettos, barrios, trailer parks where gangs duel to death,
yet through the wretchedness a woman of sixty comes riding her rusty bicycle,
   we embrace
   we bury in our hearts,
broken ornaments, accused, hunted, finding solace and refuge
  we work, we worry, we love
  but always with compassion
  reflecting our blessings—
   in our brokenness
   thrives life, thrives light, thrives
    the essence of our strength,
     each of us a warm fragment,
     broken off from the greater
     ornament of the unseen,
     then rejoined as dust,
     to all this is.

***

All the children of a lesser god, not the god revered in cathedrals or temples,
but the dusty god of our ancient ancestors, remembers and blesses us,
the broken, yet still unbowed.  

Autobiography of Eve - Ansel Elkins

Adam and Eve 1909,Suzanne Valadon

Wearing nothing but snakeskin
boots, I blazed a footpath, the first
radical road out of that old kingdom
toward a new unknown.
When I came to those great flaming gates
of burning gold,
I stood alone in terror at the threshold
between Paradise and Earth.
There I heard a mysterious echo:
my own voice
singing to me from across the forbidden
side. I shook awake—
at once alive in a blaze of green fire.

Let it be known: I did not fall from grace.

I leapt
to freedom.

***

In this new century women are finally, finally throwing off those old snakeskin stories 
which wrote them as enemies or mere secondary characters in the story of the world. 
This century, sixteen years new, has and will see women around the world leap to freedom.