Parthenogenesis
It’s easy to make more of myself by eating,
and sometimes easy’s the thing.
To be double-me, half the trouble
but not lonely.
Making cakes to celebrate any old day.
Eating too much: the emperor of being used.
Nature, mature and feminized,
naturalizes me naturally by creating
the feeling of being a natural woman,
like a sixteen-year-old getting knocked up
again. To solve that problem,
there’s the crispness of not eating,
a pane of glass with a bloody-edged
body, that is, having the baby at the prom
undetected and, in a trance of self-preservation,
throwing it away in the girls’ room trash.
Buried under paper towels, silent.
Nothing could be better, for the teenager.
For me, starving, that coreless, useful feeling,
is not making myself smaller
but making myself bigger, inside.
It’s prince and pauper both, it’s starving artist
and good model in one masterpiece.
It rhymes with marveling and that’s no accident.
Fullness is dullness. Dreaming’s too easy.
But sometimes I don’t care.
Sometimes I put in just the right amount,
but then I’m the worst kinds of patsy, a chump
giving myself over to myself like a criminal
to the law, with nothing to show for it.
No reward, no news, no truth.
It’s too sad to be so ordinary every day.
Like some kind of employee.
Being told what to do. Chop off a finger
to plant in fertilizer (that is, in used animal
food), to grow a finger tree.
More fingers for me. Stop saying finger.
I’m the one in charge here.
Stop the madness and just eat the mirror.
Put it in sideways or crush it
into a powder. It doesn’t hurt and it works.
Mouth full, don’t talk.
Nothing to say. I’ll be a whole new person.
I’ll make her myself. Then we’ll walk away.
We’ll say to each other how she’s changed.
How we wouldn’t have recognized us.
Copyright Credit: Brenda Shaughnessy, "Parthenogenesis" from Human Dark with Sugar. Copyright © 2008 by Brenda Shaughnessy. Reprinted by permission of Copper Canyon Press. www.coppercanyonpress.org
Source: Human Dark with Sugar (Copper Canyon Press, 2008)