The Anatomy of a Woman
By Miranda Davis, 2024 Nebraska Youth Poet Laureate
Photo by Clark Creative Group
Carved of marble and patience, she exudes an exhaustion heavier than she can carry. Sculpted and molded, her body aches from the places she was pinched and pressed and manipulated into shape at the hands of someone who didn’t ask permission. She did not ask to be made. She wonders how much she has to say no for it to hold as much weight as yes. She waits for a chance to rest, waits to be seen, waits for the quiet of the end of the world.
Sculpted of wood and ash, she crumbles under the pressure to succeed. To be perfect for the microscope slides and deadlines she exists in between. Her spine holds the strength of a sequoia, stretched to the sky and holding her tall just for someone to burn her down. Her womb, weary like the branches of a redwood with rings of centuries before, weighs the burden of expectation and retaliation. Her body is forced to bend for others to breathe. She wonders how much longer her back will break with the pain of someone else’s ax.
Rolling with the waves that ebb and flow through her, her heart breaks for the potential destruction she can cause. A mad, running river meets the storm of the sea, anger pours through her irises, building up wells of troubled waters. She is troubled – the mouth widening to scream but no one can hear over the tides underneath. What is she to do when every inch of her pools ache with the reminders and the intimidation and the trepidation and the boiling rage that overflows like a waterfall bursting at the seams with fear, unable to forget the polluted pain that came from the way he left her to bathe in muddied streams? And she wishes for a moment of silence.
Billowing in the wisps from below, she is a cloud in the shape of her mother with wind and stardust in her eyes and hips of anticipated ethereal storms. Her budding peace and beautiful breath echo in the air, free from the walls that can no longer contain a free spirit that is a woman. She is formed of water, with fire coursing through her veins and a skeleton of Earth and strength to carry her on. And every woman who comes from the garden she birthed is a legacy waiting to be planted, a seed waiting to bloom. She is the goddess sitting at the end of the world. W