I bound my hands and feet with satin and lace ribbons. I placed pearls and coins under my tongue. I sewed my mouth shut until I could taste bottles floating in the sea

Green bubbles popped and filled the top layer of my skin. My pores pushed out salt and foam,

the cold smooth ridges below me shattered into pink powder and kissed my heels.

My hair, sandy and rosey, nose pink and chest bare. My heart, far too big for my chest, 

always sinking me down, clasping me into shells that cut my hands when I tried to get out.

An angel in a demon's belly, ripped from the sand by the clouded star of Venus,

I spent thousands of years crying, until I no longer could, until my lungs filled with fluid and black spines.

I counted my veins until their order was right. I breathed lightly, coughing up the fat prickly urchins until my lungs were soft and sweet and cold as ice cream. My fingers still sore, the sailors still calling, the women still weeping, and the damned still praying.

To the merchants who painted my picture on teapots and platters, to the men who painted me to their liking, who pricked their little girls like pincushions, I'll remember how they laughed at and bit the women before me, like dogs in a pen, always chasing the plumpest pulp of flesh, the pinkest breast, the quietest scream, the smallest runt. 

I’ll remember how they prayed for forgiveness.

They worshiped their savior. They beat the unholy. They whipped the unkind. They called themselves heroes. They had their cake. They loved their god, the God who loved them.

The god who loved the men who devoured their women, the daughters who bled from the skin they cut off and sewed back together, so the dogs in the pen would snarl and drool over their tight flesh.

To the painters who drooled over their daughters' tight flesh and the poets who watched, 

may they all be pricked until their flesh falls into loose ribbons.

I spit out my coins but never my pearls, and let them do the same, let the dogs do their worst.

My savior was no god. My god lived nestled in my rib cage against my spine.