after Yehuda Amichai & Mahmoud Darwish
title adapted from Patricia Lockwood

Elsewhere in the world a woman is highly skilled
__at killing rats. She parts them from their lives
in the name of science, and walking home
__she sings. Her thick throat, bell of her body,

is a nation. And the woman who rises early in another city
__to sweep it clean of leaves and dreams - her body
is also the nation. No: the body of a woman is the body
__of a woman. Except for when it is a river

running red, or the cracked and violated earth. Bodies
__of women are bodies of water, true. The Black Sea,
the Red Sea, the Dead Sea, each of them is a woman
__inhospitable, dancing or asleep.

The body builds itself? Untrue. I am the production. I take
__the land in my hands, in each hand a breast, I take myself
in hand. The nation stands to attention and I straddle it.
__The nation comes, and comes, and comes. Is a woman

a nation, or is she what the nation wants to fuck? I assemble
__the experts. I assemble the nation: tit by tit, mountain by prairie.
The body of the nation shivers and a peace descends from the maples.
__All across this great nation, women open and close. They recline,

they mark time. They brush their hair in one direction, then
__the other. This decides the rainfall, and triumph
in that day’s battle. The women come, and do not come, and promise
__to come again. A woman in a given city hangs paintings

on the walls of herself, and calls the body
__home. Locked rooms of the body: right hip, inner knee,
spot on the thigh between the tibia’s two endpoints.
__Look: that woman is not a nation

but a city! She houses many poets. Conveniently,
__women wait in the wings of those lucky poems,
ready to be transformed.
__The woman, who is a city, is sometimes

singing. In her subways and sewers, rats are laughing
__at a pitch too fine for human ears.