Legs pinched and yellow as ginger root
My hands like yams, and belly,
The whole of me looks plucked from the underground,
Topped with a thin sprig - enough hairs to count in an afternoon
Face pink as potatoes in the kitchen,
Eyes plain and brown.
A trip to the market yields a bag of onions
and whispers of the monster woman.
If I am a monster, I am a recluse
Curled around and polishing the opals that grow fat as melons inside me.
Cut, I do not bleed.
My veins only hold the roar of a thunder storm
Field mice find homes in the folds of my ankle.
The weather cannot be contained in my blood alone;
My open mouth stumbles like rain drops thucking in mud.
Angry, I howl sunlight.
I used to be a school yard socialite,
But was always twice as wide as tall,
And a careful turn would tumble three of my comrades
It wasn't long before they turned on me
Back then I thought that children were the cruelest creatures
All rocks and fierce joy,
But the mothers watched with condemning eyes,
And snarled.
Title borrowed from, and poem inspired by a passage in Jeanette Winterson's Sexing the Cherry
https://www.indiegogo.com/projects/send-the-breaking-ground-poets-to-brave-new-voices-2014