Upon Inspection of These Sanctifying Portraits
firstly I would like to sever every metaphor in which my body is a meal
my breasts are not bread or anything a man would like to break & spread
I am no vessel for the butter in your mouth I have never salivated
at the legend of my breasts upon a plate paint my body & you’ve made a myth
of all its elements I am bored by your belief in purity as supernatural
hunger is an impulse that I moderate like any other reason with your hunger
& you realize it is fear or dehydration the body is equipped to handle its starvation
similarly I am satisfied alone I fall asleep & lose my mind amid the creamy insides
my thighs emerge congealed with nectar from the sun I was born
with many comforts instantly a breast inside my mouth mother-room
which nourished me yes the supple cord was cleaved yes I claw the air
when a nipple surfaces in dreams but I do not desire what is no longer
affixed to me if you haven’t filled your body adequately I am not accountable
for all that space I am not a still-life of your hunger pressed
against the bed a sharp thing enters scalpel in my chest fork between my legs
Sarah Sgro is the author of the full-length collection If The Future Is A Fetish (YesYes Books 2019) and the chapbook Without Them I Am Still A Mother (Letter [r] Press 2017). Sgro earned her MFA in Poetry from the University of Mississippi and is pursuing her Ph.D. in English at SUNY Buffalo, where she studies waste in relation to gender and futurity. She previously served as Poetry Editor for the Yalobusha Review and as an editorial assistant for Guernica, and she currently reads poetry submissions for Muzzle. Her work appears in BOAAT, Cosmonauts Avenue, The Offing, and other journals.
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