Lot

These are the lucky numbers for the Victorian lotto—
Thirty-Six, Twenty-Four, Thirty-Eight.
Your love for me is bound
between eighteen and twenty-four inches,
running down the length of all twenty-four
of my ribs. Maybe if God or the husband or
Her Majesty—whoever rules my trunk today—
would remove the twenty-fourth, I could breathe
enough to tell you this. Give my rib some fertile lay
of earth, bury it, and let it sprout
into a third sex with perfect proportions,
a sex who’ll never sweat with wheezing dreams
of what she’s not.
We walk wasp-waisted, wrapped
in whale bone, hugged to death by another thing’s
skeleton. Women of bound feet and stretched neck,
why do we love to twist ourselves into impossible states?
As if one pause, stopping at the edge for one, deep breath,
will wake us up to where we’ve come.

I resemble the hourglass that never empties,
while estrogen slips from one bulb to the next
through the tight cervix of the waist.
Always I will be the handled bearer
of your generations, always I will seem
the impossible woman sawed-in-two
while your hands trace the outline
and your lips move with the victorious dimensions:
Thirty-Six, Twenty-Four, Thirty-Eight.
Jackpot.