Jessie Jones

BLOOM

Scraped into shallow, almost hostile
questions of spring, girl feels

the full girlishness of her being
flood in. The first tulip
discovering its great head. Girl falls into the soil,

doubles

the doubles double

and divide until they’re all whirling intently
against the rich dark

so-cold-it-seems-wet.

One resists, swiping
at the pleasure of itwhile the others test
the flexing sureness of their strength.

Not pretty, but chemical
in its discovery. The raw, wiry bodies

arrange into a wheeling mass, driven wild
by the x’s and y’s of limbs slapping their fronts,
no longer about them.

What language is this, total rejection
of vowels hammering
a valley through the body? Glory.

The rising temple of the question
draws the worship of shirtless men,
their violence enacted like a duty.

Watched, girls do harm
to the shape of themselves, sink
through space toward an empty comprehension

where the question of stopping stops
the thought mid-think.

Girls expel their selves
in order to survive them. In those shapes,

men recognize the coarse machinery

of womanhood. What fresh blood.
Wind runs through the tunnel of them
and they all leap into the sky, exhausted.

Submission changes them, breath released
in clots. They sail 
over the fence like arcing darts

with the steam of men trailing behind them. A single sweaty
verb remains, heaving, unable to be changed
or claimed. Metamorphosis sparks

and sparks but won’t catch, won’t be caught.

MIDNIGHT SUN