...became a woman who learned her own skin and dug into her soul and found it full.

One can't build little white picket fences to keep nightmares out.

Death, I need my little addiction to you. I need that tiny voice who, even as I rise from the sea, all woman, all there, says kill me, kill me.

... and my love stays bitterly glowing, spasms of it will not sleep, and I am helpless and thirsty and need shade but there is no one to cover me- not even God.

Put your ear down close to your soul and listen hard.

Let God be some tribal female who is known but forbidden.

I find now, swallowing one teaspoon of pain, that it drops downward to the past where it mixes with last year’s cupful and downward into a decade’s quart and downward into a lifetime’s ocean. I alternate treading water and deadman’s float.