Billie Sainwood
“Breasts when pressed against the chest of my girlfriend some years after her top surgery”
The dream of my body gathered
slow and deliberate as lichen
smoothing and stippling the oak of my skin
until the tree became more than its bark
until the bark became a new truth
a new color, a new and living flourish
that yields to the touch.
The dream of her body was struck
by lightning taunted with a rod of rolled up calendars
until a scalpel of light split the oak
and made the tree sizzle with newness.
Pressed together we are a forest of change
a thicket of my hard-fought soft
her softly yielded hardness.
Her chest.
My breasts.
Her scars of the glorious injury
Her christ-like proofs of resurrection
Flattening my fat.
My stretch marks of patient prayer
My ropes of Stylite devotion
Purpling and worsening like ecstatic wounds
against her vellum’d bones.
To make a cross, to make an altar
We cut down two trees.
We shaped them in a lathe of tongues.
We fitted them together
and bowed our heads.
Billie Sainwood is a poet and writer from Atlanta. Her work has been featured in the The Passionfruit Review, Don't Submit Magazine, and the NoSleep podcast. She keeps a diary of her inspirations and neuroses online at https://billiewritespoems.com/. You can find her on Instagram @billietriestowrite and Twitter @DriedMarigolds.
