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Poetry | November 2016

Prima Materia

By Amy Robinson

My prima materia is uterine rock,
castoff mineral, tissue moons.

Buzz Aldrin’s first words when
he stepped on the moon
were words we don’t often hear:
Magnificent desolation!

I wonder, if I dive into those words,
will you accuse me of being uncaring?

In London there was a little park
I passed through twice every day.
It was studded with deep green
gravestones, and pillowed with quiet.

It held me for a little while. In the morning

I entered through a far-flung
wrought iron gate. In the afternoon
I slid by discordant concrete, the back
wall of a shabby pub’s private room.

In the middle there was simply someone
else’s past, and sky between the trees.

I’m not a mountain to climb on, I tell
my children now. But why? I offer
them landscapes: fleshy mound of belly,
shoulder peaks, inexplicable calloused heels.

My daughter dreams a sinister woman
who smokes a pipe of willow wood. She
runs away. She’s still too young to know
how to pass through, or even stay.

I dream a black snake slithers off an altar
and I swallow her. She coils in my womb,

at home, poised to proclaim with forked tongue
the moonscape beauty, the sheer
uselessness of what surrounds her.

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