Cambodia

Taking Off My Clothes

I take off my shirt, I show you.

I shaved the hair out under my arms.

I roll up my pants, I scraped off the hair   

on my legs with a knife, getting white.

My hair is the color of chopped maples.   

My eyes dark as beans cooked in the south.   

(Coal fields in the moon on torn-up hills)

Skin polished as a Ming bowl

showing its blood cracks, its age, I have hundreds   

of names for the snow, for this, all of them quiet.

In the night I come to you and it seems a shame   

to waste my deepest shudders on a wall of a man.

You recognize strangers,

think you lived through destruction.

You can’t explain this night, my face, your memory.

You want to know what I know?   

Your own hands are lying

Carolyn Forché, 
from Gathering the Tribes

*

You kiss like a soldier, 

you move like a snake, 

in your marble body there´s nothing I can break.   

(...)  

Use, use me, make something pretty of me. 

Excuse this naked mess, 

I refuse to own myself under these present circumstances, 

take it as it is my dear friend

Rosenvinge