Aubade with Gravel and Gold

I’m sick of speaking for women who’ve died
Their stories and their disappearances
bludgeon me in my sleep

Their language is the skein in my throat
that unravels every time a bullhorn blows,
every time a road

is paved, every time a railroad
is constructed, ballast to blast, built to last

against the orange flames
of an open, unwritten sky

The bad ballad
of a silenced, hellbent woman
bled its way into my jaws

And I wake up this morning, every morning
eating my disquiet

Crack my window open, their breath rushes in
Me, this body, the same weight
of disappearance, same weight
of fortune

Last night a woman from another century
entered me, and her male phantoms possessed
me, all night I was warm,
cold and savage with their touch

Heatless factories shorn of silk, muslin,
and selvage, machineries like guns,

no salve for the women’s cracked hands,
no salvaging their rations, their ambitions
for survival

There was the child of a famine
There was a girl sold for three gilded ounces
at the old San Francisco port

They sailed, they sailed, they sailed through me
and I turned gold with that touch