Toward Eden by Brooke Sahni

Paradise and punishment.

Eve reached and was punished.

Sometimes I think I am given too much.

Sometimes I think I want to destroy my own making.

I don’t believe in the fall.

I believe in desire as an Eden we long to enter.

That when we are full, we ache for more.

We plow the ground of trees only to plant more,

to have a home in beauty and long to leave.

But this isn’t about self-destruction.

It’s about a world where beauty keeps coming for us.

It’s for the soft power of human muscle,

your arm, then, exquisitely designed to reach

and for my body’s ability to know to soften

at its approach.

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Brooke Sahni is the author of Before I Had the Word (Texas Review Press, 2021), which

won the X.J. Kennedy Poetry Prize, selected by Maggie Smith. She is also the author of Divining (Orison Books, 2020), which won the Orison Chapbook Prize.