For centuries, wheat wasn’t suspicious, a criminal
to be watched from the corner of your eye

in case it reached for the gun.

It was goddess-touched, gold-scented,
a wild grass descended from neolithic plateaus,

where horses, who never knew what it was
to be broken, followed the sun.

Today, I’m eating toast for breakfast, chewing softly,
urging my body not to be afraid,

wishing I hadn’t wasted years measuring goodness
by everything I denied myself,

my hungers collected and hung around my neck
like bone charms to keep evil away.

I wish I had spent more time with dough in my
fingernails, and flour in my hair.

I wish every gluten-free, sugar-free, dairy-free, vegan
protein bar had been a cookie,

and that I hadn’t made myself sick with worry,
when no food could ever be dirty.

I wish I’d remembered the taste of mom’s brownies,
and how when I got to lick the chocolate spoon,

nothing hurt.

My heart was never good with rhythms, it could
never master being a drum, a timesheet, or a clock.

It was too busy being a beehive: a record
of sun paths, the name of every flower

written in dances, a nuptial flight, the way
I crawled into your mouth hunting for pollen,

a burning drop of bee venom, a beeswax
castle, a queen telling herself

that she ate her infant sisters because
it was war, a thumb-lick of honey

from noxious weeds, the colour of mustard
and old coins and hot sand,

the bitter tang of sprayed blossoms,
irradiated fruits, genetically modified roses,

the old beekeeper opening me with smoke, and
sixty thousand bees shivering with prayer

for him to stop.

and as I’m driving through traffic I listen
to him explain about

the rise and fall of testosterone with the
shortening and lengthening of days

as the sun pulls our blood by
invisible threads

coaxing chemicals from glands, like
glass eels hunting the moon.

As I work and pay bills and drive home
and cook a dinner I can’t remember tasting,

my body still knows the sound of the sun,
and the feel of night fingers reaching

inside me.

Even here, buried by the world,
the stars find us.

Shame is found in church,
where women go monster hunting
with glances.

Shame is found in hope;
in needing people and undressing
in front of them.

Shame is found in kindness
offered in the shape of apple pies
to a lover

who then offers jokes
to his friends—jokes
shaped like me.

Shame is in the throat
that can’t swallow jokes;
I always choke.

I cough up seeds that give birth
to mountains, to forests, to small shrines
of little shames.

Shame is the fingerprints and scars
I left on my own arms; the way I used my skin
as a pillow to scream into.

Shame is the time lost
when, instead of shaming myself,
I could’ve gone hunting for monster hunters.

The way the building shook itself
free of our shapes

until my workplace was gone
and your friends were gone,

until the new city was swaddled in smoke,
taught me to fear the ground.

To fear the eyes and bones
of a brooding father,

with me the child (again), waiting
and wondering if today

is the day when he huffs, and puffs,
and blows our house down?

But a long walk in the park,
surrounded by summer oaks,

reminded me that it was us
who built churches on top of fault lines,

and when the earth rolled over
in its deep dreaming,

we asked, what did I do to deserve this?

We ate poisonous hearts and vomited
ghosts onto our bedsheets

and cried, what did I do to deserve this?

We dripped nightmares into rivers
and longing for whitebait, for water,

we moaned, what did I do to deserve this?

We started wars and buried bullets in neighbours
and when they fired back,

we demanded, what did I do to deserve this?

We chased the shamans and witches
who spoke with moss, with mountains,

to the edges of the woods,
and burned them,

and when the ground heaved with
unknown languages, and all the chimneys fell,

we whispered, what did I do to deserve this?

Meanwhile,

the elder trees are pregnant with
late summer berries,

the streams chuckle through Hagley Park,
full of eels and spells,

and the mayflies flit about, light with games,
never wondering why, sometimes,

the earth moves.