Between my thighs is the warm shadow of lips,
And the erotic curves of fear, beauty, myth, lust
growing a plant of such medicine
all healing starts and ends
in the carnal shudder civilizations like to forget.
Memories caress the Baltic Slav skin,
Memories too old for Christ,
Carrying astral messages from ancient lovers
Returning with that sense of what has been forgotten
Their juices, recipes and other lands.
Can I, JaDeive, find the abandonment of egoless spirit
And let them all speak their ecstatic languages
And pour themselves each into each divine part of me?
I will become the language of flowers, a bark syntax, a silky bud
Where shy coyness and gentle tongue laps
And licks the balms and creams
So my psychedelic spine unfurls each microdose, each sex dream
From long ago.
Come back to my native lands and hear the bells of desire.
Bielun, Daturna, JaDeive, come and come and come unto me
Self-proclaimed Goddess, praSlavic vessel of
the green flame, the impossible cool burning mystery
of Proto-Indo-Europeo Holy Mother transmission
come to the garden of
Agni Jnana’s spiritual derangements
And disappear.
About the author
photo by Kasia Lada Pietkiewicz, May 2021.
Jana Astanov is an interdisciplinary artist, a poetess and an independent curator born in Mazury Lake District of Poland and currently living in the Shawangunk Mountains, in upstate New York. She is the author of five collections of poetry: Antidivine, Grimoire, Sublunar, The Pillow Book of Burg, and Birds of Equinox. Follow her on IG @Jana_Astanov & Twitter @JanaAstanov
