I count them by pulse, by the heart’s dull thump of I am.
Inanna descends naked, names peeled to bone.
Psyche learns the weight of sleep, the price of a coward’s love.
Eurydice looks back, knowing the rule & breaking it anyway.
Hecate lifts her torches; the darkness is the only reply.
Sappho protects the leap like a rumor the sea remembers.
Mary Shelley stitches the outcast’s grief until it walks.
Emily Dickinson folds her thunder politely into a drawer.
Sylvia Plath listens for bees in a bell jar, the poetry
chars & hexes—salt on the tongue, scripture in the lungs.
Frida Kahlo paints her spine gold; a true queen knows
to wear what shattered her completely as sovereignty.
When the red field opens, women learn how to carry fire like
verdicts.
