This is the official blog of Northern Arizona slam poet Christopher Fox Graham. Begun in 2002, and transferred to blogspot in 2006, FoxTheBlog has recorded more than 670,000 hits since 2009. This blog cover's Graham's poetry, the Arizona poetry slam community and offers tips for slam poets from sources around the Internet. Read CFG's full biography here. Looking for just that one poem? You know the one ... click here to find it.

Monday, February 5, 2018

"Our Death is in Your Belly" by Christopher Fox Graham



our death is in your belly
a mass of muscle and sinew
stitching with her own needle
four helixes into two
a ribbon dancer
pirouetting with our DNA
in a 40-week recital before leaping forth,
half-you-half-me
and ending our lives

our death is in your belly
because before her
we were strangers

boy                  and                  girl
ping-ponging                  across                  the                  continent

until we collided hips into a moment
when we both forgot our names
shed our skins into each other
poured and swallowed our best intentions
two short lifetimes of sins and sorrows
into hope of something better than us both

our death is in your belly
because once she arrives
reforming us into something new
we will no longer be Self and Other
but Her
entire
and no shatter of time
nor territory
can unmake the magic
we distilled into her cells

our death is in your belly
bearing a name we have chosen but not yet bestowed
a name she will shape
with experiences chiseled from scraped knees and first kisses
painting her legacy across the tongue of history
until he speaks her story
into the generations hence

whatever name we articulate
afterward, the echoed men and women will call her
the name trees have 
for earthquakes

the noun waves use
for tsunamis

or what shattered moons 
call the supernovae
that reduced them 
to asteroids


our death is in your belly
and when she cuts umbilical
the arrogant World will know his greatest sin
was not anticipating her arrival
not building enough bomb shelters to preserve his deceptions
not assembling an army to resist her

so she will leave in wreckage his broken promises
turn into refugees the Should-Haves and Might-Have-Dones
that civilizations left behind in the vapor around their stone monuments

you
will be the mother who bore the joyous cataclysm
and I
will be the failure
she will rectify
in her own time

our death is in your belly
how we die
will be up to us
                  and what kills us
                  up to fate

but she will be our death
the last face we see

the last hand we hold

the last voice we hear

as the light dims in our irises

as the mechanics slow

to a dull whisper

as the organs take well-earned vacation

from life-long labor

and she,
looking back
will be the price paid
for all we have endured

she will be our death
the daughter to bury us both
first one,
then the other
she will be our death
judging whether our lives be worthy of eulogy
she will inscribe the epitaph
telling the world
what we have left behind

whatever she writes
will be for her,
not us
for us,
she is what we left behind
she will forge the fire
our privilege was to light the flame

she will be our death
and I can hear the rumblings of our doom
when I press my ear against your belly
she sounds like gods 
of 6,000 mythologies ...
... trembling

she sounds like a love song 
stars sing to each other

she sounds like Four Horsemen 
before loosening themselves upon the World

she sounds like a poem 
just before it is spoken

she sounds like revolution 
wrapped around the first bullet

she sounds the whisper in the night 
that ignites 
the
Big
Bang

she sounds like the ache 
of our first kiss
when it was still partitioned on our lips
knowing our next moment
would end in death for us both

but a little girl we have yet to meet
would ferry us into the dark

unafraid of what may 

not 

come

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