Teresa sweeps the ocean floor
searching for sunshine and piano keys.
Dissonant and dark sound notes underwater.
Images of once-pleasure and her long-ago watch
appear then are lost in the sand. She gifts me her teeth,
then grasps only to find her hand, wrinkled.

And she is only one of them.

In the tangled and complicated roots of all life,
my grandmothers are restless.

Within the bones the marrow, within the marrow the memory,
underneath this ability is an agility for change.
These minerals feed me and I reach through the secrecy.
As mountain I dive underground and together
we reshuffle the alphabet,
blur the tones of dust and dare,

go below the status quo,
center on the ceremony of kindness and fire

and then step back.

A song comes down from the ancestor of sunlight
and it’s the grandmother of thirteen moons, forgotten,
now causing us to swim up and upstream,
calling us to draw her medicine into our fibers
like the trees, calling us to risk all for change
for dancing, for warmth, for healing.

For even the most rigid amongst us is here
because we have let go into being

so we can be reshaped and readied

for the start of sensation, species snake.
Yet another grandmother’s voice enters my toes,
spirals up and through and around my hips
to my liver plump and wanting,
ripples through my torso as a wave from pelvis to chin
and as a kiss settles on the center of my tongue

ready to taste and be tasted.

My lips meet soft and close complete
and I swallow wholeness.

I could flee or be free and yet in this anatomy
there is family and they stand ready
to teach democracy, singing the gifts of the sea
as columns for me to stand upon,
a regenerative topography
immersed in my own skin.

Immune system activated.

I rock and wave with a tincture of nations
and creatures, plants and minerals.

The global body ignites a gathering.
This is Mt. Etna, thick lava of life,
churning in its unrest, destroying what has been
that hasn’t served women,
water on fire, on earth, breathing,
pressing, slowing, when needed, exploding

creating mountains where they belong
so our eyes can cast upwards.

My body, re-membering.

Arms extend for an extended embrace
and these bones, this womb, this heart
suspend, savored lifted fully-fed.
No boundaries, only purpose,
regenerating for the generations,
new earth, here.