her naked butt-side
as I walk home
asking, what is poetic
about the moon or back?
The hung-open sky
is everything & nothing
like moon or body because
it’s always poetry when you say
body or moon & when you say butt
the music splits inside & the moon
broke so long ago, we’ve forgotten.
So why is there a pleasure
in the wronging or the being
wronged? The toughness
in my great-grandmother’s tongue
was like two moons once, avocado
& its seed, swallowing
generations to bear
more broken moons
& when my love
grabs my ass so hard
I think I feel his hands
reach the place where once
I carried life, I can’t help looking
to the sky, mouth waxing, body
both the crater & the rock, body
both the birth & birthing, body because
when I say my my my enough,
my body enough, possession realigns,
when I say my body, my ba ba ba body,
I hear my Babas
who told me, your behind
is dirty, told me, poetry
is clean & shining & not
about the body, told me, yours
is not a place that one should touch,
& taught me touch
is everything & touch
is love & touch is what the moon
is made of, so when my love
touches my ass & I admit
I like it, the shame of it,
the dark side & the light, shame
the waxing reach, shame
the opening & everything
it carries, life
& shit & shit
inside of life &
when my son came out of me
they feared he had already taken
a shit inside, but the first thing to emerge
was not a scream, the first,
from his two, tiny showing
butt-sides was shining,
black coal, a stone,
a poem, a body,
a brazen new moon
out of the old.