Wetting the Clay with Blood

Thoughts of ancient Sumer stir my heart and dry out my throat,

something the tears sitting at the top of my nose cannot moisten.

These Sumerians, their cuneiform script, dedicated wedges, 

latent signals to the woman sitting on her sofa in 2025

scratching her eyelids over and over out of anger, 

because her writing cannot adequately cure

her glazed-over look, her chronic loneliness.

Can’t I just take up oil painting instead?

I suppose I am wickedly glad that these clay workers

had found their purpose, had succeeded where I today fail,

had transformed the world in a way in which I can only continuously stumble,

posting like a frantic teenager to TikTok once a day–go ahead,

fulfill the gifted-millennial promise. 

Some mediums will push us to succeed and I see TikTok’s

algorithm as a boost here, ancient Sumerian clay tablets as less so–

is this why I bruise?

Yesterday afternoon when I got home after my 9-5,

I ran upstairs to my bathroom and went to look in the mirror,

quick to notice that I couldn’t see my face, a plight I had suspected 

would occur on the yearly midpoint (don’t ask, it’s astrological or paranoia).

This is the part where I admit that while I am, indeed, obsessed with TikTok,

I have a strong interest in clay, in molding. 

Do you know that we are all made of polymer clay?

Molded by the hands of the universe?

Then some of us were thrown wildly on the moving wheel,

a slab, an unformed chunk once called “unacceptable,”

once called “formless” and once called “bland,” once unneeded.

We were the ones spun from the dizziness into order and into reality.

Maybe give us some honor.

When it was time to make slip and more moisture was needed,

we gave of our bodies– we literally wet the clay with blood. 

We made a new product of ourselves, sacrificed our cells. 

Did the Sumerians do this? Could they have made this claim?

For all that the contributed from Ancient Mesopotamia,

was their art in blood?