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YOUR CART

Maria S. Picone

Cubits
or
力

from my strong planks they made 
dimensions of ache       strain      yore      called
me this bitch, this barn, this barn
-storming woman rained on their shining
shoes, their seven sons, their sheaves of wheat, 
their rose bowls, & i filled and filled
with a power     unknown          to man           
not that power    to take    to yield      to give         to give 
birth but contain, contain, bleed. all these eternities shored
up inside me                womb dreaming
animals            heart                         racing 
against the man who hammered & sawed & kept & used 
his power not to break new rice fields but to warp 
wood to his monotheist monoethnic monolingual mono
-tonous desires: then he smeared me with his bitter
compound, filled me with          neuroses     zoonoses    
psychoses & when it didn’t plague 
me he gave me a man
’s name, only with an A to signify my sex
-less androgynous asexual apathetic acrimony
& when his nail slipped inside me 
i took on no water; i declared        i am not your vessel & 
after, they told me 
at least he gave you a name—in this world women normal
-ly do not receive names              that’s why
there is a Lot, there is a lot
of ’s wife, there is a Viola, there is a viola
-tion, there is 力in the rice fields of 男
there is wood & there is temperance,
& there is too much wood,
& there is not enough temperance
& that is why i carry marks                     at mizzenmast
why this manmade vessel              kept its nose down 
did not sink          in the assault        
likens to a girl, that is why (& not why) i have been         
tempered           seasoned        scarred      un
-sunk

S. Erin Batiste
Maria S. Picone is a Korean adoptee whose work explores identity and social justice. She has been published in Ice Floe Press, Moonchild Magazine, and Whale Road Review. A HUES Scholar VONA alum, and Watering Hole Fellow, she won Cream City Review’s 2020 Summer Poetry Prize. She will be in Best Small Fictions '21. Twitter: @mspicone.
Art: Public Domain
  
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