If the place where I kiss you is one day to crumble, like any old temple where once there were worshippers in white dresses, and prayers were thrown up to the image of a savior, and later there will be excavation and conjecture and tourists with expensive cameras and money for souvenirs…
If these souvenirs should be a sliver of your bone found under a heap of stone or a tooth fallen from your head when you were old, or a letter you once wrote to a sweetheart with confessions of masturbatory thoughts of her doing the washing, or a cup you drank from and expected someone else to wash in the holy water that had once been blessed by the highest priestess of you…
If this highest priestess studied for nine years under the tutelage of the greatest scholars of this small country and could eventually recite the secrets of your blood in the forty different languages in which it originally ran and finally traveled to your humble birthplace to be consecrated and bathed in the healing waters of the lake that pooled there…
And if this lake were clear to the bottom. And the bottom of this lake was hard packed sand and not mud. And local lusty teenagers sometimes snuck from their parents' homes at night to skinny-dip in it which, if they were caught, would've been a sacrilegious insult to the government and would've resulted in an immediate hanging but since they were never caught…
If, caught up in the moment, they whispered that they would love one another until death while knowing all along that they had no tangible evidence that such a love ever existed and, taken by the soft waves, they made love up on the white sand…
And if the sand were crawling with fleas that left conspicuous bumps all over their limbs so that they were beaten by their parents for their indiscretions…
…well, then,
This delicate bowl, at the center of your chest,
where I kiss you
Is a good beginning.
41 Pages
$9
isbn 1-59661-052-2
“What did we expect?” asks Stevenson in the “Day We Died.” Her readers can expect, and will be grateful to find, honest, urgent questioning; longing; a careful, understated wit; curiosity about language; and, despite the disappointments and uncertainty, no small measure of hope.
—Sima Rabinowitz, author of The Jewish Fake Book and Murmuration
In The Procedure, JodiAnn Stevenson's prose poems attempt to capture the unease between two people, the unraveling of a relationship, the tiny chips that serve to fracture what seemed to be whole. This collection is the portrait of a woman searching for the words to describe the heartbreaking, tentative fragility of human connection.
—Jeannine Hall Gailey, author of Becoming the Villainess
