Tissue
Do I recall what I did with your scar
your text pleads, decades gone, scars ongoing.
I had my own: my belly sliced open
like melon, the heavy suck from my gut,
boy child pulled to air,
still you want to recall my tracing your scar.
Then they box cut my scarred tissue again,
pulled that burst wormy organ from sickened soil.
I had my own: my belly sliced open.
You opened me too, my Green Beret, piercing
blue, thirst for you, oceans inside me swelling.
Do I recall what I did with your scar?
Iraq was on your back. I traced it, you said.
I tongued its ridges, tasted blood.
But what did you do with my belly sliced open?
We spilled out of beds, hiked from our homes,
found ground to cover, forests to sprawl.
Yet you ask what scars I might recall as
I think back to my body, open.
*
Seen
Six years old, I stand between
them, two brothers swapping
stories over beers, sitting snug,
traffic headlights peering through
our bay window into Saturday
night living room football.
Shampooed, pajamaed, I come
to the men when called
from my bedroom, good girl
giving hugs and kisses
to my uncle, my thirtyish
dad gesturing behind me.
He fast pulls my bottoms
to the floor, my butt, bud pink
pudenda smooth, bath bright.
My face flashes red, folds
in pain, their laughter
landing all over me.
The last of thirteen kids
during depression and war,
my small father learned
to prank, to clown, to get seen.
He stayed that way.
Sometimes when cooking
dinner for friends, drinking,
hungry for their howling,
I’ve flashed my breasts
to surprise them, danced alone
to Nora Jones, my arms
snaking around my head,
legs laced in spidery black,
shimmy to the kitchen
to scrub every dirty dish in sight
*
VA Smith’s first two poetry collections are Biking Through the Stone Age and American Daughters (Kelsay, 2022 and 2023), followed in 2025 by Adaptations (Green Writers Press) and coming in 2026, the chapbook Urbanity (Seven Kitchens Press.) Her individual poems have been published in Southern Review, Crab Creek Review, West Trade Review, Calyx, SWWIM and dozens of other journals and anthologies. She currently serves as River Heron Review’s Poetry Editor. Find her cooking, baking, urban walking and country hiking, loving on friends and family and resisting authoritarian oligarchy.
