venus comb

By Kristin Berger

All the women I know are done twisting themselves inside out.
Applying eye cream, adjusting the mirror, covering the gray,
hiding their chins. The small moons of their ovaries
might send out one more egg like a pilotless explorer―
The women are done watching for blood.
They listen from a softening center, vertebrae like antennae,
for the scuttle of years hoping to sit next to them,
quietly, like a rumor, like beauty.

Kristin Berger is the author of the poetry collections Refugia (Persian Pony Press, 2019), Echolocation (Cirque Press, 2018), How Light Reaches Us (Aldrich Press, 2016), and For the Willing (Finishing Line Press, 2008). Her long prose-poem and collaboration with printmaker Diane Sandall, Changing Woman & Changing Man: A High Desert Myth will be published in 2020 from Nightjar Press. Kristin lives in Portland, Oregon, where she co-hosts the Lents Farmers Market Poetry Series, which has brought over 40 local emerging and established poets to Outer Southeast Portland. More at www.kristinbergerpoet.com.