the word for vagina is dawn

In Kogi, the word for vagina is munse,
the same word as that moment their priest sings the dawn
after hiking up to the same narrow ledge, every morning, for the prayer,
leans his back into the mountain, turns his eyes toward the sea,
until a surge through his body signals the white light of the munse,
the great mother’s doorway, has delivered him into the new day

Just another day, like every day before that…
I want to reach before even that
to that moment God looked up at first dawn,
as she spilled it and all of the universe forth,
and said only, jaw hanging open in awe, “thank you.”

I want to know if the bird sees the dew the same way I do
or if beauty is impossible to see
without knowing its absence intimately.

What I really want to know is,
is this the start of everything, really,
that God looking up from her work and being stunned,
and the god tending her, being stunned by that awe,
and her god, and hers, and on it goes,
and goes, and delivers life to itself
a yoni folded over yoni over yoni,

as if it is all, really, existence
kissing itself as it kisses itself
as it releases everything and embraces it
in the big bang of every breath,
every accordion Mandelbrot nautilus galaxy pucker
of every holy sphincter of your life,

Saying no, saying yes, saying oh no,
saying thank you, you don’t have to know
how to carry a tune,
you don't have to know how to draw hands,
all you have to know is
that there is nothing sweeter right now
than gazing a beagle to sleep
while the gold dust mites
nest in his eyebrows.

Zippers for chests

Zippers for Chests

It would be easier
if they made zippers for chests,
he tells me, running his fingers along
the scar, stitched stem to stern
down his torso
like an Amazonian snake.

It kelates, adopts his yoga
to writhe with its own will.
I like watching it move. Sometimes
it’s all I see, as if it is the first born, the host,
and he has merely latched onto its back.

If I soften my gaze, I see it initiate
his movement, his body responding
like kelp drawn across a wave.

It moves, undulates, surrenders,
another expression
of a larger current.

Sometimes, when he allows it,
I reach around from behind,
run my fingers lightly
enough to feel the warp and weft,
reading the Braille of this body.

I do this as quietly as possible,
my fingers listening
to each breath, careful
to let what has been closed
so carefully
to stay
that way.

-Eilish Nagle 2017

snowball

We are at the big round in the dining hall, the fancy room at the center where they make the residents wear suits and good shoes to dinner. Shedding the velour loungewear, important, when there is nothing else. It takes over an hour to get my mother ready. I am tense, heartbroken, dutiful. She has no idea who I am, or who she is, but lets me remove the stained hospital gown. I have to move in slow motion, reminding her limbs that moving is safe, not an attack on what has rigidified into place. It is always hot in here, all year, and stinks of soap and pine sol and bedadine solution, alcohol wipes. I am wearing those little leather flats with embroidery on the toes, the ones she bought me back before, forever ago, before the beginning of this long good-bye, when she bought herself the same pair. We were not cute that way, twinsies, ever, and this sweetness, a calm between battles. Driving shoes, she called them, back when ladies also had tidy leather driving gloves. Dark suede, not my style, but I never threw them out, and for this: I want to remember, and to forget, maybe, as she has, my brain the scuffed EtchaSketch in the waiting room, scribbled with broken language of a lifetime, spoken and unspoken, half-sentences taken and broken and stitched back together, and then “THWAP!”, gone, as the sheet is snapped back by the trickster God , saying “Just kidding!” And my belly backflops, and relaxes at once at the thought. Nothing is just one thing, yes, but the way we move through one moment is the way we move through everything. Mrs. Quan in the next room is wailing again, shoes scuffle outside. I wish I could smell the snow. I want to bring a snowball to her room, but really it is just a cold thing in her palm, and all she can say is…”Ow.”

today was like this

today was like this

Nose, kinda sore from that damn grindstone…
So, breaking away, took a new trail
way west of habit
and immediately, thank you,
saw Coyote before she ducked
behind some manzanita,
but left this:

Don’t be all up in your holy, she says
So damn serious, you
while I piss in the sacred fire--
make sure you're closer to the real divine,
not that Walmart altar precious one,
cause if laughter ain't allowed,
Soul ain't gotta chance.
just so ya know
in case you were wondering
and I know you were

Begin Here

from the archive, for the New Year

BEGIN HERE

I wanted to find you a story of new
beginnings, so I began
where anyone would:
from the collective unconscious
of Google,
but don’t ya know if you type in
“new beginnings,” you get thousands of sites
that start from despair,
beginnings folded in with recovery,
unwed mothers,
all kinds of sisters and brothers
rising from the gutter,
like phoenix fires,
lovely, but,
I thought
save me jeezus,
we’ve been there.

So I wanted to begin again:
what if there is no down
to rise up from again?
So I think of creation made again
and here is re-creation,
Recreation,
god’s sport on the ballcourt,
We take a pause to play,
re-play our way of being ,
remember,
re- member
we are members:
not drops, but ocean,-
reclaim our place on the court of play,
this life,
not a recovery, but a celebration,

‘cause each animal makes play
in the same way,
be you weasel or wombat,
with the same look, an invitation, like a soft stroke
of a laughing brush, saying
remember?, this is what we’re here for.
Now, show me whatcha got, doll!
Try and bite me…!

Yesterday, a three year-old
Showed me his favorite shark,
an ornate wobegong...
the ornate wobegong,
a shark with daisies on its back,
no lie,
a shark,
with daisies on its back.

So let the soft animal
of your woebegong body
tumble against mine
and love what we love,
because every beginning ,
yes,
carries death
as its lovely cousin,
the rise and fall of each
breath, baby,
One big accordion
…so let’s get on with this polka.

~Eilish Nagle~

Burned (from the archive)

Burned,

beyond belief, though she can tell
it has been this way for many years
--a mistake on a top of a train,
live wires arcing
through his small frame, shooting volts
through the soles of his feet,
stigmata--
yes, this happens, or a pipe bomb
in a trashcan in the backyard or even
a father, lunging at him,
a wounded beast, gascan in hand
after his mother left,
there are so many ways this can be
it doesn't matter, he is here
at the cafe, face
half-cooked, skin fused over one socket, arms
mottled in every shade of distress
she looks
without looking, like everyone else, sees
his white cane tapping, thinks she can
look a little closer, now that she knows
he can't see her seeing although she knows
he can
always see people seeing that's the way it is
when you are
but she has no shame
takes a good long look and he turns
toward her so she can see him staring
at her staring, eyes lidless and black, hawk-frozen,
still a blur for him, hands feeding
air for the scones somehow he knows
to grab a currant not a cheese roll
by mistake or maybe he just takes what he gets
and that's that fumbles for change
his coins spill to checkered tiles and no one
moves, he is self-sufficient after all, and he finds
most of the coins but not the quarter he needs
it is down there somewhere, he douses
with his cane, scrapes his shoe
along the floor he's almost got it
but misses and she is omniscient, can see
what he can't, but she bends
down, scoops up the quarter, hands it to him just
as he asks if anyone sees and she sees
places on him that are not burned, places where flame
hopscotched across flesh, leaving skin unscorched,
like hill fires that take one house, leapfrog over
the next he takes his scone
to go and she is left drinking her half-leaded
latte but she can still see him drop
the warm bag on his kitchen table, lean
his wand in the corner, move
toward a patch of sun to feel the warmth
on his skin he takes his shirt off she knows
the graze of his leathery fingers, not over the small
buttery patches untouched by flame: under his arms, nor behind
his knees, nor his sex, hard and smooth as a dancer's thigh,
but across the lacquered scars of his chest,
his grafted clavicle,
where nerves closer to the surface
shiver, remembering, at his touch
what it is to feel too much

--Eilish Nagle

Spring Cleaning

Spring Cleaning

A month before I left you, the mice came,
leaving nibbles in our pears
and turds among the grape nuts.
Each brazen spring they waltzed

across sunlit tiles to celebrate
their grand fecundity in the darkness
of our pantry. So we unwrapped
the glue traps in silence,

laid them down before us
like a pact, end to end like barges
along trade routes, a daisy chain
around the stove, across the pantry

threshold, knowing the engagement
this would require of us.
Snappers do the work for you,
hard and swift, while you're at work,

or asleep, perhaps, leaving only
a small bundle that is flicked,
clean and easy, into the trash.
But glue traps demand your presence,

reserve your catch on a tiny tray
until you hear the panicked scream,
one that is mistaken for squeaking,
but the first time I heard it

I knew the sound, that keen
diminished note; I knew
it was my turn. I filled a bucket
with warm water, a gentle bath,

scooped up the plastic tray
which had caught just the hind legs,
so when I raised the mouse
toward the bucket, it arched

its back and flailed its free limbs, and I felt
all of its body, a fistful of fur
and tail, no heavier
than a spoon of butter, a quarter cup

of raisins, with its small determination
of muscles, defiant tendons
like spring twigs, all of this
strained against me, against the red

bucket, and I could feel it and still
I held my breath and dunked it
as it reached its claws
like rays toward the surface, mouth gasping

open and then it stopped. It stopped.
I had expected it to thrash
like a man, like some large
animal; I was unprepared

for the limpness, how easily
it crossed the line of surrender, how easily
I had acquired the expedient hand
of a god

and though you had done this
before, you could not see me
alone in the kitchen, leaning
over the stainless

steel sink. You could never know
how efficient I was,
and how easy the next one would be.

Eilish Nagle