may god so keep me.

Amanda D'Avino

i don’t know how i feel
about the bruises their eyes leave on skin.
i don’t know how i feel
that the shape of a body can turn profits,
be spun into paper-plastic dollar bills,
monetized. Weaponized.

Wordlessness.
we must have been born into it--what other reason?
voices plucked hurriedly from daughters,
scattered like ash to the crash of oceans.
death to the innocent
for there is no innocence
without exploitation.

but we are crafters of the miracle,
we are crafters of the fury,
we break the sky and eat the moon.
weeds whisper Eden-secrets
and from that we bore civilization.

we birth the daybreak, sloping into the red horizon,
into green apple orchards and orange groves
and the pastel blush of romance.
we birth the demons, too:
the flames of hell
cascading down into darkness, white autumn and
black winter, into famine,
into the sinking ships of
nuclear holocaust.

women are the beginning and ending of everything.

---

Amanda D'Avino

Amanda D'Avino grew up under the Florida sun, but currently resides by the sea on the south coast of England where things feel just gloomy enough. She enjoys poems that sit somewhere between tenderness and discomfort. She loves her dog, Sunday, her husband, awkward silences, and the beauty in things that don't quite fit.