Sara Femenella

Infidel

I spent my fertile years pulling spines out of the backs of goddesses,
trading uteruses under the gaze of men who took their best virginities 

along with a handful of pomegranate seeds, another ruined woman
rising whole cloth from their legislation. 

I tell my husband how I like it, soft, slow, faster. First I loved
the saints, then the gods, then the men who drew moans from 

the parts of me where a stag bleeds in the moonlight. I like the violations.
I take my ruin well. Still, I never thought it would go this far. 

The child bending to give the mother the spoon.
The mother wringing the uterus out over the sink. 

Like most women, I’ve made a lot of bargains when it comes
to the uterus and now I’m looking for someone to blame. 

Who took this body, left it to and fro and zoned for something else?
What would I do differently if I could go back to the beginning? 

At night when my husband rolls my body onto his I want
to sink myself into him, to descend down to the beds before ours, 

down to the first time where there was the bed and there was
the man binding me to the story of the bed, there was the dark 

and there was my body’s pleasure where the bed met the edge
of the forest, there was heel of a hand pressed to the back of my neck, 

there was my ear pressed to the black haunt of the earth,
my tongue tied by the strings I would not learn to untangle 

for years, there was the stag lowering his head to drink
from the stream. There was not even blood.

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Sara Femenella's poems have been published in Pleiades, The Journal, The New Orleans Review, The Saint Ann’s Review, Denver Quarterly, Salamander and Seventh Wave, among others. She lives in Los Angeles with her husband and son.