Blood Boils a Family Whole
We can’t see the weight of festering wantJust out of reach We taste
Darkness on lips tar sealed honey stung
How do you hate/love
With a rope burned heart
Familial brother/sisterhood abandoned
ethnicity scorched belonging
When a parent dies Is it relief or grief
What remains from distilled pain
Hallelujah praise the distance between
mothers and daughters who refuse
to be saved in your God’s name
Someday the call will come
Rib-caged shackled lungs screaming
Emancipation tongues bit clean through
sharpened on inescapable jagged truths
Can you see in your mind’s eye
The cost to belong Blood boils a family whole
Dodadagohvi – we will see each other again
Standing among hellfire’s burnt religion
May your savior have mercy on your soul
Mine savors death with all my relations
Walking behind me comfort me not
Mother Monster
Mother’s Day is jagged and sharp edged,cutting deep the umbilical cord
bloodied by a desperate need to belong.
Birth isn’t a biological clock, tick tock
uterus push, blush expel
the baby out the vagina, please.
No need the unwanted pregnancy.
Some mother’s desire
the life inside, not out.
If I were a harp seal, mother could have
weaned me in weeks, abandoning
me on an iceberg wilting away
before I learned to swim.
I could have been a cuckoo chick,
a lazy mother left in another nest forgotten;
Raised by an altogether different species,
crushing unknown brethren.
Black bear motherhood
requires more than one.
The one she abandons, two or more
she’ll raise. As if the one
wasn’t honorable enough. I wasn’t.
You though were a bit like a black eagle,
watching her chick’s sibling
winged rivalry for attention until
one kills the other inside.
Favoritism is mother’s favorite game.
Mother? Monstrous giver, like a rabbit
who only briefly visits the burrow,
doing as little mothering as required.
Love wasn’t, isn’t required.
The uterus push, expelled body likeness,
into birth, does not a mother make.
A child isn’t property used as a bargaining chip,
love quest, unloved currency.
Mother may I, father may I not,
forgive a mother. Love is required.
Sage Ravenwood @SageRavenwood is a deaf Cherokee woman residing in upstate NY with her two rescue dogs, Bjarki and Yazhi, and her one-eyed cat Max. She is an outspoken advocate against animal cruelty and domestic violence. Her work can be found in Glass Poetry – Poets Resist, The Temz Review, Contrary, trampset, Pittsburgh Poetry Journal, and Sundress Press anthology – The Familiar Wild: On Dogs and Poetry. Forthcoming – Grain Magazine, Massachusetts Review, and Gothic Blue Book Volume VI, A Krampus Carol, Smoke & Mold.
Banner: The House, The Moon, a painting by Robert Frede Kenter. Oil pastel on paper. Twitter: @frede_kenter
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