To My Body
I love you.
I have never been more afraid of you.
You who curls my thick Jewish hair around your fingers
like a lasso
like a noose
A strand of copper DNA woven from Holocaust
from the rolling of Italian and the windish throat of Hebrew
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You are both bomb and fortress
bracing against itself
crawling with doom and joy
Esurient for life
the juice of it
The way I want to lick it from these palms
with a tongue built from annihilation
I tap my breast bone
and it pulls the levers of catharsis —
flushing out from each rib
so I might let this life back into me more slowly, more gently
so I might know it without being devoured by it.
But you, my body, do not know how to feel life slowly or gently
you only know how to hear it
Like a blast so loud the sound waves bend themselves
into a single sharp edge
a screeching so consuming it finally brings quiet.
