Velocity

Dear Panties,

38 DEAr PANtiES, When the healer told me about the bad energy in black and red, how could i not think about my lonely vagina, how its walls feel only each other, like holding my own hand? And how, for years, walking through my walled-in days, i’ve favored these bad-girl colors, so at least i could whisper, These are really hot, as my own hands slide them off. Dear new panties, i choose your flowers— orange and yellow and pink— two days in a row to brighten the parts of my body so mostly my own as i careen through South Dakota, as i sit now in Sioux falls, where i can’t find falls, where men walk by in sun-tight skin and ignore my excuse me’s for directions. i don’t want their fingers, but can i have their eyes? 39 here, i wear this superstition— flowers blooming between my legs— because my questions are windy and wide as a prairie: Why does fear wall in a heart? What happens when a body becomes invisible? it’s too simple to say a prairie is simply empty, to say there are no answers. here, a world of grass holds down the soil, digs down in stringy curves the height of me, finds water. ...