Niente, Niente, Niente — Blackbird Archive

← v17n2, Fall 2018

As a child, I claimed to find beauty

Not in the sky but in the dirt.

Now all that is left of my body

Is river clay and dust.

I try to purge this desire

Until I, like the sea,

Am nothing but empty.

My rib cage a hollow reckoning.

The things I hunger for most:

A stretch of moonlight, the notches

Between a woman’s spine, the salt of her.

Once I put my tongue so far inside I tasted her core.

To be hungerless is to be holy so I tried to be

If not pure then something empty,

Abalone, shell, girl, the pink matter

Of my menses, dried to only an absent scud.

At night, the stars hurt my skin.

But in the dark, I know, all dykes have halos.

desire sexuality spirituality

Brynne Rebele-Henry

Brynne Rebele-Henry is the author of two collections of poetry: Autobiography of a Wound (University of Pittsburgh Press, 2018), winner of the AWP Donald Hall Prize for Poetry, and Fleshgraphs (Nightboat Books, 2016). Her poetry, fiction, and nonfiction have appeared in The American Poetry Review , Denver Quarterly , Fiction International , and Prairie Schooner , among others . She is the recipient of numerous awards, including the 2017 Glenna Luschei Prairie Schooner Award, the 2016 Adroit Prize for Prose, and the Poetry Society of America’s 2015 Louise Louis/Emily F. Bourne Student Poetry Award. Photo by Tara Rebele