Last summer I was sitting around with some friends, talking about incarnation and imagining what it might have been like for our higher selves to design our human lives. Afterward, I wrote this thing about a bunch of raucous goddesses getting together in the spirit realm to show off their creations and celebrate each other’s audacious magnificence in a bawdy, unapologetically braggadocious sort-of fashion show, almost like a cosmic feminist rap battle.
I don’t know what to call this thing. It’s kind of a prose poem, I think. (If you think it’s something else, please tell me what.)
The Garment
Here in this absinthe-green chamber, the air thick with visions and sticky-sweet with the nectar of creation, we meet to showcase the garments each of us has custom made for our sojourn on planet Earth. The theme of our collection is emancipation, and the material is woman. Strutting across the stage, here come suffragettes and brothel workers, witches and lesbians, writers and artists, outlaw landowners and women’s libbers, each fashioned from lust and brine, from marrow-rich bone and uterine blood.
With the unveiling of each piece the room reverberates with hoots and trills, roars and whistles. Lightning fists strike scorched tables. Breasts roll, bellies swell and hollow. Smokey-eyed and ruby-lipped, we knock back shots pulled from the fountain of youth and quake the floor with an approving stamp of our diamond-tipped boots.
Look, look: see my human woman! My fleshly portal into the mortal world. Isn’t she something? I will settle myself behind her eyes and drape myself in her skin, her chemistry, and her self-concept as I walk through the world under her name for the next eighty-odd years.
She is a curious little beast, wild and lusty, all appetite. A tiny powderkeg, a confetti cannon spring-loaded to scatterburst across the landscape. She will press herself between the pages of the Book of Life like a four-leafed clover.
My human woman is spun from gossamer-fine fiber, delicate and strong as silk. She is a hummingbird whose wings never stop whirring. A pulsating jewel, all blood and breath and nerve and metal. An unblinking eye, a prism that bends light into rivers of color. She is a book of prayers that can’t be parsed into chapters.
See her body! An instrument of hedonic pleasure. She is warm and wet; devouring, voracious. She plays the sirens’ song by ear and will not put her music away, even well past nightfall. When the sleepy people shutter their ears and their doors against her throbbing bassline and high soprano wail, she rolls out a chattering melody, the clang of church bells, the tinkle of a windchime.
This body is a continent at war more often than it is at peace, a place for heroes and martyrs and shrines built to honor the fallen ones. For the life-giving milk of refuge and redemption. For the righteous uprising of the downtrodden and enslaved. She is a Valkyrie, Athena in a slip dress.
My woman is a rushing, raging river that hides a thousand lost treasures in its murky depths. Bright with flashing minnows, she sweeps away homes and villages and livestock, peach blossoms and green twigs and abandoned plans alike. Nothing that touches her remains unmoved.
She is a playful and greedy brook. You will slip on her slick, sloping banks and slide into her churning depths. This is certain, because you cannot resist her glittering waters. Her swift current will carry you far from home before your oar ever finds purchase on her silver surface. Come for a tentative dip and be tumbled to emerge dizzy and new, washed upon a foreign shore.