TO THE MAN WHO HEALED ME AND BROKE ME:

My love,
Do you still carry that viirginal lambskin I once cut from my flesh for you? Did my fleece make warm enough bedding for you?

 My love,
I plucked every hair from every follicle on my body to spin thread and weave clothes for you. I oiled and flayed and leathered my skin to make a bed for you. I butchered my muscles and flesh to make food for you – extracting the tendons with such care,
I knew you never liked it when I fed you gristle…
                                         I emptied myself into you.
                               I gutted myself
                                                         with gratitude for you.

I am sorry I wasn’t the virginal goddess you once wished I was, or thought I was -
I never meant to mislead you.
I tried my hardest to be your Madonna and not every man’s whore.

My love,
I am trying to love my body the way you loved it… trying to love my body the way you loved it and not the way you hurt it.

But I can still feel the sticky fumbling’s of many men’s hands on my flesh when I am alone;
I tried to hide from them in fields of calla lilies;
fields of calla lilies I grew from my entrails for you.
But their fumbling hands still haunt me.

Perhaps I should’ve become a laurel tree when I still had the chance, like Daphne.
You would’ve loved me better that way: eternally fruitful, eternally flowering, eternally virginal.

I am the dismembered lower mandible of a pigeon trod on by my mothers horses.
I am the spine of a magpie, murdered by my father’s dog - wrapped in a bow.
I am not sure if I am a cavern or a vessel… or a crater… or a wound…

I still love you. Even in death.

Sincerely,
Your love,
Ivana

A LETTER TO A SILVER PRINCESS GUM TREEE:

Hello my darling,

How tall and slender you have grown… Reaching with all your might toward the sun – away from that hypertrophic memory of trauma. I wonder if it hurt when they did that to you. Did you cry, and bleed, and mourn that thickening trunk that I am sure was once beautiful and strong?

Now all that composes you is that singular limb – no more bipedal – but grasping at the heavens anyway, with all your seductive fragility.

That limb; that cycloptic arm – she too is covered in snaked gashes. I can see that your desire has been to reach outwards, to encircle the earth with your embrace – but they have forced you into perpendicular growth, away from the vessel, toward the phallic, they wish to make a sky scraping cock out of you.

But you reject this, as you do. Flowering and blooming and giving birth. I see this in the empty vessels that litter your frail solo limb, vessels that were once titillated and teased before pollination, vessels that once perfumed the air with a scent dizzyingly saccharine.

I cannot escape your wounds; I wonder if you mourn that primordial limb that they took from you. An infanticide of highest debasement – to take away that trunk had been thickening since your inception. I can still see remnants of her ferocity at the bulging of your roots where they lick the soil. I am sure those roots grasp deeper and wider into earths belly than I can comprehend… What does it feel like to hold our parent in that way? To grasp her and drink from that vital decay of her breast? – I have always wished to be an agent of subterranean power, to exist beneath that barrier and be held in that muddy decaying benevolent embrace.

               Does it feel as joyous as I have always imagined?

               Does it feel safe, and warm, and all knowing
                              as I have always imagined?

               Has it given you answers to the questions I have spent my life pondering?

What I am trying to say; is does it feel like home?

Does being so eternally enmeshed with the infinite life source give you wisdom I cannot comprehend? Perhaps your wounds and castrated limbs never bothered you, because the eternal mother held you through all your grief.

               I never had a mother like that.

I am sorry I fixate on your scars, when you are so infinitely remarkable.
I only ask
               because my limbs are covered in hypertrophic imprints of trauma too; wounds that were the result of men trying to metamorphise me into a sky scraping phallus, much as they did you.

I never wanted to be perpendicular to the earth, I wanted to become her. I wonder if you feel the same? I wonder if you give little thought to any of this at all, or if earths embrace qualms any anxiety.
               I am so envious of you.

What does the soil taste like?

               Is it ecstatic?
                        erotic?
                        orgasmic?
                        affirming?

I am so envious of you. I wish I were you. I love you.

I love you.