Orion’s Belt, My Hips

It is the first day of 2012.
What are you afraid of?
Last night I cried
and said out loud

I didn’t expect I’d still be waiting tables
at the same restaurant I was at 6 years ago.

What changes in the heart?
Where is solitude?
Who makes the body pure?
What soulish fiend am I?

Always hungry for the escape,
the deeper inside to get away from
reality.  Who said reality was where anything
mattered anyway? I swallow beauty,

rail against the beast of skin
when too much of everything
growls back at me.

What year is this?
What woman am I?
Who nailed the spikes into my heels?
Who told me heels made a woman?

East Village you dirty, loud, unruly heart.
East Village blood and chambered fruit.
East Village pump my heart chokes

on seeds of every pomegranate
reminder of love.
Love and marriage.
You can’t have one without the other.
I want.

What is Purity?
Whose hands fashioned the hips, the back?
Who curled the rib cage around a fluttering bird?
I heart.

I wail for a living’s sake.

I drink my tea with sugar.
Year.
Year.
Year.

No coffee.
Sugar cubes no milk.
Soy milk.
What kind of half alive is this?

What kind of cancer comes from smoke?
Stacks back against family?
Liver.
Throat.
Breast.
Lung.

When does it come together?
The dots unconnect themselves,
sprawl across the sky as stars.

Orion.
Legs like God.
Whose footstool
am I?

Amy Leigh Cutler

Amy Leigh Cutler

Amy Leigh Cutler is the author of "Orange Juice and Rooftops" and a few chapbooks. Some of her recent collaborations can be found in Jonathan Weiskopf's "For Some Time Now" and Wooster Collective's "G