Yes, I Know it Hurts

Above the tannin-stained water buzzes
a doe-eyed horsefly, her wings like old windows.
She’s waiting for the warm, exposed pieces
of you, perhaps the crown of your head, hair
parted by the lake’s weight, or the tender
crest of your round shoulder as you surface,
the water’s bitterness clinging to your skin.
She is not malicious in her bite, or
how she laps the blood from the sawed wound
she makes. You are a plump, ripening fruit,
a turn in her own cycle, a simple
necessity for the eggs she’ll soon lay
on the soft surface of one wide, green leaf.

*

Mitochondrial Eve

The incredible improbability of a woman
(who survives) who has daughters
(who survive), each daughter a wonder,
a river teeming, and on, over
a hundred thousand years of surviving
daughters, a delta, now, reaching always
for the ocean, each division a multiplication,
and above the slowly gathering silt
there is a soaring,
a thermal caught and ridden.

*

Sharon Denmark (she/her) is an artist and writer from southern Virginia. Her work has appeared in Poetry South, The Shore, ONE ART, Wild Roof Journal, Sublunary, 3Elements, and Floyd County Moonshine, among others.