Our fingers butterfly through window bars to winged testaments.
What rough wounds we carry, their scars, are meant to be cleansed.
Allow the clanging tune of your own blood to slip
from your ears as a stream. You are a nightingale’s water, meant to cleanse.
His sin can not taint for ever. These two white cloths parallel
your body, and the needle, how he marred. To sew is meant to cleanse.
After he poisoned me with his sex, he cut my tongue from the root,
watched it flop on the floor. An unstringed guitar is still meant to cleanse.
He silenced you with threat, with the perversion of love’s touch.
I am as wide and seeing as the night, he said. You are the star, meant to cleanse.
We will braid hair and sunlight into this colored thread,
make a woman’s robe of twisted beauty, a woolen memoir, meant to cleanse.
A single strand can be alchemy, transmute envenomed intentions into elusive liberty.
Muted queen and child, we are more than shards; we are meant to cleanse.
Copyright © Raina J. León 2013
