Musing on Lilith Lost to Time

The myth is Grandaddy’s mother

birthed twelve children

by twelve discrete men. I asked what she did for work

and my big brother (of a different father)

laughed at my insinuation

that sex could be her job.

As if being a whore is a joke, a lark. As if she

a ground-dwelling songbird

with her streaky brown plumage,

didn’t shift her bones to shape the world

twelve times. It was America, after all.

It was 1930 to 1953. It was Beaufort,

South Carolina, and a woman

is her own business. What’s so funny?

How many times did she make the shape of the sky

with her legs, the oblong sphere of the earth

with her belly? How many times was she an ossuary?

Lilith with her crooked feet

maybe could only deliver her song

in flight, crest pressed forward by her back’s arc,

belly swollen from fucking in that good

sweet way women do when they want to.