sermon

“Give not that which is holy unto the dogs, neither cast ye your pearls before swine, lest they trample them under their feet, and turn again and rend you”

- Matthew 7:6

Mother god in the name of Girl—I come to you
as alive as I know how asking you to be
an unbloodied knuckle sandwich, be unfucked, and in
an undulant ocean of selves and salt bone of my befores. Be the first word
out of my mother’s reborn mouth. Be swine-repellent or the pearls that look
like pearls but don’t bust from too much pressing down. Be that
which is holy and make dogs deathly allergic. Be
me in an un-rendable skin-sheet. Let this poem (Earth? Body?) ? Be all of you
and none of me for the sake of your people. Amen.

In this story somebody will say it is your fault.

In the book of Matthew, Jesus gives a speech
to a crowd of people on a mountain. He catalogs the rules
for living a good life. In the present,
an open and calloused fist irons this scripture
into a daughter’s mouth—makes pearl about pussy,
squalls into a crowd of only daughters.
Daughters dance like clams out of water, hinge ligaments
torn. Somewhere close by
a factory of pigs await pearl in pissy alleway,
in small budding girl-children, calling them women
as if they don’t already have names,
waiting in their classrooms, right here piggy-zippers ajar,
trotters stroking piggy parts,
and piggy cum. Piggy sound
like a war of dog barks. And anyway
someone will say it is your fault.

In a mucked and shredded glass
the daughter says to her flesh it is my fault—for I came
of a darkened womb, of cement splattered in blood.
Here, daughter becomes a bed saying fault
in every creak of metal spring.
Daughter
becomes fault, becomes mother.
Daughter
birthed into fault. Pigs wait
or don’t.

Tell your neighbor—neighbor, oh neighbor

we don’t all make it out.

Neighbor, oh neighbor

Pecola Breedlove’s small body is

a room

of us.

A woman/       on corner/        yells/    my pussy/        my choice./      Listen close/    she has/
a / murdered girl/       in her throat/ the body/             in tonsil/          reeks of break/ fast meat. The/
woman is/      dead too. This /           corner the/      pearl-less grave/          no cross for/    her headstone.

Everyday
when the rapture raises the dead of the earth
some-thing on legs instructs a girl to
know her worth—the instructed bodies
are one pearl, a garbage bag of blood,
no mouth and here. here. here.                                                                       Will you come?

Shaina Phenix is a poet, educator, and Virginia Tech MFA poetry candidate from Harlem, New York. She is—her work is—obsessed with and possessed by many sounds of black and femme existences, the passing down of stories, ocean, the body, mothering, acts of loving, and home(s). She has poems in Rue Scribe, Crooked Arrow Press, and is forthcoming in West Branch Wired. She tweets at @ShainaPhenix. https://shainaphenix.weebly.com/