Herodias, by Isabella DeSendi

Herodias with the Head of Saint John the Baptist, by Francesco del Cairo (Italy). 1625-1630.

Herodias

 In your orgasmic stupor, you sleep
                with a man’s severed head in your lap

and in the man’s head, a dry tongue
                dead as a slug in late September.

In nature, brutality is law and there is nothing
                more beautiful than the body of another

being whipped or chained or scoured because it means
                that we’ve survived.

What else is ecstasy but the light
                Cairo has chosen to paint you in.

Even the natural shadows that rest against
                your eyes, soft and grey as unfurled sails

are at peace with the small wreckage
               like a gift in your hands.

I know it’s something stronger than sleep
              which takes you now--

you’re tired of enduring.
              Walking down Broadway at night, I imagine

mutilating every tongue that harasses the body
               I perceive as mine.

Herodias, teach me not to feel
               regret, to like the sound a neck makes

when it breaks, the blade cleaving
               clean through bone. I’d give anything to know

the pleasure you feel when pain makes pain
               regret what it’s done. Show me. Put a knife

in my mouth. Leave a hole in my body
              big enough for you to touch.

Isabella DeSendi

Isabella DeSendi is a Cuban-Italian poet from Florida residing in New York City, where she's in the midst of completing her MFA in Columbia University's Writing Program. This past year, she was selected as a finalist for  the 2017 June Jordan Fellowship, Narrative’s Ninth Annual Poetry Prize, and awarded a teaching-artist residency through New York City's Community Word Project. Her poems have been published in Two Peach, The Grief Diaries, and are forthcoming in Appalachian Heritage.