I. YOU TAKE A BITE BUT I'M STILL WHOLE
i am both bread and the body. both the butter and the knife. you swallow half of me and say i'm not enough. you play tender with the flesh of god and say i am unspeakable. a force of indescribable myth. a figment of faith which fades over time like smoke into air. no one worships the twelve olympians. the roman spirits abandoned. the norse deities reinvented. you are not permanent. you question my existence as if i had not made you. as if you hadn't come from the womb slathered in my blood begging for just a morsel of milk. i am both bread and body. you; both a parasite and the burden. you don't get to live in me and say i can be undone. i embraced your hand when you left. i wiped your tears with the sore pads of my thumbs. i have held you in my arms as your heart shook with rhythm. i am alive. i am alive. but you claim i was never enough. they told you god was a man, through magic he made eve from bone. but both you and i and every soul on earth has risen from blood. my blood. doughy flesh, yeast of breath, flour to ash. i have kneaded you with heart of my palms to the very tips of my fingers. now say it with me.
i am both bread and the body.
II. I'LL CRUSH A PIECE OF YOUR HEART AND CALL IT PRAYER
you had slit my throat and talk in my stead. you cut out my tongue and wonder where's the voice. you say there is no woman, there was never a woman, only the outline of her body. you say it's for them. the daughters of eve who've broken the bone and ripped the breast to become adam. the women who no longer call themselves women because gender has narrowed the gap of what a woman could be. it is for them you say, as you boil eve from the inside out like she's soup instead of human. instead of them. instead of me. a woman. try as you must. the people you've dubbed non-men and the bodies of breeders will always resist. we will not die. we will not falter. we will always rise again. the truth is in the way i look at you. as i set the knife in the wound and bless it with salt because no one bleeds for you like i do. you know no one ever has.
a mouth like yours should repent.
III. 3 NIGHTS AGO GENESIS TURNED 19
you may sip, you may bite, you may devour, or spit but i will always remain whole. i am both bread and the body. both blood and the wine. both starvation and the supper. both sickness and the cure. both flesh and the dust.
and for dust you are, you shall return to me.
