Drawing out the Truth

We dot the town,
pitiful,
breast worn,
hair once clean,
nerves twice tried over,
and underwear
underwashed.
Somnambulist,
you think.
Weary,
rusted through,
used up
and discarded,

but I know better.

We've a club.
We're doing it.
We're chopping wood,
making kindling,
starting fires;
soot the charcoal
of our poems.
We write ourselves
across our days
as our children
paw to breast.
Divorced,
you say.
Chosen,
I respond.
Chosen
to live anew.
We've no secret handshake
but we do smile,
one to one
from beneath our oily dreads.
Do you know how beautiful
light truncates
beneath toil?
It fractures
in grandmother tea light splendor
as we ply to fingers,
tongues out,
to draw out our own slivers,
mini
plays of ecstasy
from swollen puckered skin.
And when we do,
release is sweet,
and it is
all ours,
each to each.

(I see us around town, usually kicking it over the speed limit, trying to inch hours together to get it all done, these women who don't know each other, but who do know more of the other than anyone else might.)