THE WARRIOR IS A WOMAN

Tina Chang

After Yesenia Montilla

How does a woman become a heroine, a muse in her own story? How does she become a martyr by laying down her knives, alive, sleeping next to her own body?

Her body is beautiful but not in the mind of men. I am worn, scarred, I see an ending now. It is not finite, it has no edges. It is far off and close, a distant point with a dual face, one turned to the past and its wars and burning spears, another to the future, a target as red as an open furnace.

I look at paintings of heroines on horses. If I could summon such weapons, I’d wish for battle in the mornings when I arrange the cutlery at the kitchen table.

I cleaned it up last night in the light, I caught my reflection, a woman washing the dishes she just cleaned an hour ago. The battles again and again. The most significant are the smallest ones.

I am my best self when all the fires are out. Little flame, stay silent. I pray to you, spark under the pot. The alarm sounds in the house at the slightest hint of smoke.

Last night I thought I couldn’t go on. All the domesticity. I laid down my weapons, cut my hair, scythed my lowest needs along the grass. I left the field of horses to cook. I lifted my head to smell burning.

Harvest

Megan Pinto

All summer, I prayed for clarity of sight (light falling through the leaves, a flock of starlings before rain …).

Of the psychic, who counseled repeatedly, that I must become familiar with love, so as to see its opposite when it rushed toward me, those fragments, its song, linger, rising up, now and again.

I was to let pain drain from me like earth, after rain.

O, obsession, that closed fist.

(Though, here again is mist, rising off the water just after dawn …)

Now, autumn comes early. August leaves brown in the heat. Detritus from the maple covers the street where a pearled wasps’ nest glistens in the dew, while wasps drift hazily in and out.

Like those figures, which cloud the edge of memory, dissolving each time in a kind of rain.

How should love feel when we receive it?

I think of those late summer walks through the meadow and the neighboring meadow, where I was not longing but the one who was longed for.