I’m thinking of you, lying
on your back after angels
have filled your mouth with milk.
If you speak, flowers will grow
from your lips, and you’ll open
as a garden to the kingdom of rain.
Fall through the bed, the floor if you have to.
If you name the world before this one,
you must die again. And are you ready?
To be thrown into the deep?
Listen. The dead depend on your surrender,
the spring of warm milk
in the breasts of all mammals, on the holy
well between your thighs. Be taken
like tufts of silk from a milkweed pod
in a field of wind. Levitate
with dawn between your legs. I promise
there’s no power, no dark
by which light breaks without you. Stay
pulsing, your mouth like water.
Study it all your life if you have to.
What it takes and won’t take.
It is your wetness, your softness
that can’t be had. Don’t
let them take your tongue. Offer it
to another woman, the voice
you have found in her mouth
as sacrament.
A recipient of The Sewanee Review poetry prize, Kara Olson’s work has appeared in Grist: A Journal of The Literary Arts, Sinister Wisdom, and other publications. Her debut manuscript, The Order of Blooming, was a finalist for the 2025 National Poetry Series, the 2025 Hollis Summers Poetry Prize, and is seeking publication. She lives in Minneapolis, Minnesota.