the birth of venus

after Botticelli's ‘The Birth Of Venus’

the sea coughs her up

like a vestigial apology,

a calcification of samson

girls caught

on kitchen scissors.

she watches the true lover's hair form

                                                            matt

                                                  on

                                    matt

                          on

          matt

waiting for some mother's hand

with some cheap plastic brush

to tug out the briny clumps

to say, i know what you are

                           just a girl

                             like me.

but she is a eunuch's daughter

presented, damp and limbless.

she is an aphrodisiac fished

from the drowning pit,

fettered to the motherline,

the ancestral dowsing rod.

the pudica stalks fold

into a generational request:

    TOUCH-ME-NOT

now, we're left out to dry and dreaming

of stabbing daddy's eyes with salt pillars

but it is easier to sublimate.

to sink into silt mattresses,

        to breathe

and get high on the carbon

dioxide, shared with all our sisters

mouth-to-mouth with these pebble

pocketed ophelias

                 floating by.