Incarnation

~ Debra Rienstra I. Framed in museums she is translucent, as if sighs could pass through her, soft-edged as moon-glow, smooth as satined marble. Serene, jeweled, inclined in posed compassion, a lily-maiden face upturned to answer politic desires. We queen her, squared in two dimensions, beg her to decant the watery pulp of our prayers. II. Her eyes close, her mountained belly quakes, veed thighs shudder, a glazed infant head bulges the taut O of mortal earth astonished. She lifts him to her salt-streaked cheek, her young mouth laughing. She frees her hair caught tight in his unyielding fist. III. In the rupturing witness of our bodies, the clutch of infant hunger, she queens us.