Wild mothers and their young

kiersten Holland

death by woman raging

i want to sink my teeth into the world

shake like a dog.

i want it to feel the violence i feel from unwanted eyes.

i want to bring blood to the surface,

have it run down my chin,

stain the ruffled collar of my blouse,

stick golden curls across my dripping mouth like lipgloss.

i want the world to hurt like i do.

i want it to bleed out in a parking lot,

while doctors shake their heads,

say they’ve done all they can.

there’s many reasons a woman could die outside of a hospital,

none of them have anything to do with her weight.

there’s a funny sort of pain that comes with being a woman.

i want the world to be born starving,

with heavy shoulders and tight chests,

soft hands that form hard fists.

a foreign anger that sits in our stomachs

from our mothers and our grandmothers,

waiting for the realization that the world

doesn’t give us anything without

having us claw our way up from our premature graves.

death by futile dreaming

i am not a mother,

but i used to dream that i could be,

before i thought that it would kill me.

somewhere there’s a baby in my arms,

wide blue eyes and golden peach fuzz hair.

i look at her and think home

because i was her first home and

she is my last.

i fear will never find another.

she’s felt so close lately,

the idea of her almost near enough to touch

like i was growing and growing to meet her,

only a handful of years away.

i’m not ready yet, but i will be.

except i’d be passing on this foreign anger

except the polar bears are dying and

i haven’t seen good snow in years and

the summers feel like dying a slow death in a convection oven.

except she might have to protect herself

with the pink backpack we picked out

for her first day of kindergarten.

how can i teach my little girl to love and protect others,

except at the other end of a smoking gun?

so i cry and i bite and i hope that things can change.

i don’t think that things can change.

there’s too much debris,

too much blood,

too many people looking for witches.

witch hunts burn women and

i cannot raise a fool.

sometimes i meet her when my eyes are closed.

somewhere i press my nose to her soft baby hair and breathe her in.

somehow she wraps her tiny fingers around mine.

like a bird in a cage i mourn what i can’t have.

like a wounded dog i rage at how much they’ve taken away.

but still somewhere there’s a baby in my arms.

i’m not a mother.