bible belt reliquary

I haven’t worn a bra in twenty years;
at a certain point,
the whole contraption began to feel theological.
All that lifting, separating, and correcting,
a beige doctrine of apology.

But my 32DDs have been loose in the republic for decades now
and my nipples still point straight ahead:
hard all day and hard all night,
like two tiny deputies
sent to keep order or destroy it.

This troubles people here in the Bible Belt.

The women with cross necklaces cut their eyes at Publix,
the men at the gas station perform their liturgy:
look away, look back, look away again,
as though my chest were a roadside revival
they are trying not to catch the holy-rolling spirit of.

I like that I unsettle them
by walking into a room
with my scandal already loaded.

Sunning them outside,
lifting my shirt to the hard Southern light
until they go warm.
Two ripe animals gone still at the edge of the field
while somewhere behind a curtain
a neighbor senses blasphemy
without being able to name the denomination.

These girls have logged hours.
Ten years of breastfeeding without a break,
sometimes two children at once, one on each side,
my body running a twenty-four-hour diner
for the beloved and the starving.

My tits have served as field medicine
and folk remedy,
like a low-cost rural clinic
curing pink eye, ear infections, strep throat, poison ivy.
More practical healing
than half the men in ties making decisions
about women’s bodies
from climate-controlled buildings
with dead plants in the lobby.

When I lived in Mexico I fed two abandoned newborns
who could not take formula.
My body stepped in where the world had split open
and held two tiny lives to the earth
by the mouth.

That matters to me more than beauty or desirability,
more than every glance I have ever caught
like a fishhook in passing.
They have made food out of blood
and made life where there was almost none.

My last lover worshipped them too,
loved sucking on them because they still made milk,
because something painful and pre-verbal in him
recognized the door before his mind caught up.
Therapy and ketamine couldn’t reach it,
all those psychedelic pilgrimages
with their expensive lanterns and talk of ego death
came back empty-handed,
wearing beads and a thousand-yard stare.

Then this:

my nipple in his mouth
and suddenly some lost little creature in him
stopped wandering the halls.

It’s erotic and ridiculous and holy enough
to irritate every category
and I laugh about it.
A man can spend years trying to find God
through protocols and the jeweled machinery
of modern healing
only to discover what softens him most
is lying down at the breast of a braless Southern woman
like a foundling in a fever dream.

Funny and filthy and,
regrettably for everyone invested in sophistication,
true.

And I love that truth,
that these nipples remain erect
like they are on permanent alert,
expecting history to square up.

I love the offense of them, the immodesty,
the excellent posture,
the sheer refusal to droop into cultural legibility.

Round here, a woman in her forties
with breasts that still arrive before she does
and a chest that looks permanently interested,
is a public problem
through the long American pageant
of turning women into symbols
and punishing them for being made of flesh.

Mine have stayed flesh.
They have fed the abandoned,
cured the afflicted,
started small brushfires in respectable men,
and given church ladies something to pray against
in parking lots.

They are not here to be tasteful,
more like folklore,
like a roadside stand selling peaches,
fireworks, and absolution.