Why I Write

Artemis
by Olga Broumas

Let's not have tea. White wine
eases the mind along
the slopes
of the faithful body, helps

any memory once engraved
on the twin
chromosome ribbons, emerge, tentative
from the archaeology of an excised past.

I am a woman
who understands
the necessity of an impulse whose goal or origin
still lie beyond me. I keep the goat

for more
than the pastoral reasons. I work
in silver the tongue-like forms
that curve round a throat

am armpit, the upper
thigh, whose sigificance stirs in me
like a curviform alphabet
that defies

decoding, appears
to consist of vowels, the beginning with O, the O-
mega, horseshoe, the cave of sound.
What tiny fragments

survive, mangled into our language.
I am a woman committed to
a politics
of transliteration, the methodology

of a mind
stunned at the suddenly possible shifts in meaning--for which
like amnesiacs

in a ward on fire, we must
find words
or burn.