We women watching under eye shadows

Seeing is believing.
Done through heavy sooted eye-
shadows.

New, meant come around 
all over 
again.
We noticed,
nothing new.

Women still paint their faces,

but abstain from powdering noses,

            and will travel as far and wide enough

to know a full revolution

            of the hips when she feels the need
to dance,

when hoops slip into too tight of spirals
we feel confined.

Given time

the stains come out

and by reduction to the lowest possible whole drop,

                        some flesh tones become singularities

condensed into specks, spread across any open faces

                        sunk into  black holes that may only escape 
as screams.
There was a trace. 

What progress we felt on our burning skin,

blurs as age rounds off soft female edges,

                        yet the spine protrudes, more

and gums get back up in order

to suck out the ivory scene
leaving a chalk outline.

All life in circles, women come around.

Known for orbit and making

headway

            by the expansion of ego and 

squeezing in equilateral points, the men did
squares and wrecked tangles.

Forward was no direction-

to give 
away.

And finding this Now, Here,

           was terrifying.

There were unseen toxins in the air.

The smog-always Over There.

The disease thrived in another suffocating body.

Would we feel less,

we would ever know

if we were in it

or it was in us.

Knowing not 

why we came or why we remain,

heavy, 
we carry on a stench 
wrapped around our glacial shoulders.

A few were inoculated against such

vertiginous long views, like standing up-
right

where Up was no place

for land lubbers.

Women won't follow 

directions. 

Most felt the calamities rising,

considered the unreasonable temperatures,

and the harshness of storms as personal 
lashings, mis-behaving as
the judged and jurried.

From overhead,

sensed the shifting clime,

and sought sources

                        backward, by untangling those wires,

going on invisible signals.

We find the Current that carries us. 


Painting By Marion Boyd Allen (1862–1941) (http://the-athenaeum.org/art/detail.php?ID=49019) [Public domain], via Wikimedia Commons.