Clockir

My stepmother did NOT like the way her Libertarian Viking Neighbor framed pregnancy as the fetus "attacking the woman". She incredulously told him this was extremely disrespectful to expectant mothers to portray pregnancy as so violent and negative.

Libertarian Viking Neighbor's response was that people consensually hurt each other all the time, and "there's like a whole community about that, with the acronym the one that starts with a B" And his reasoning was that if the mother was consenting to bring attacked by the baby, it in fact wasn't violent and negative because there was consent.

Oh Mary, contrary,

the shape of her laughter

how it would ring through the kitchen

like a spoon against a glass,

bright enough

to wake my mind from slumber

I know the weight

of her sleeping head on my shoulder,

the careful way I’d carry her

from the car to her bed

without waking the dream from her eyes.

I know the thousand ordinary miracles:

half tied shoes

sticky fingers

crayon constellations on the wall,

feverish midnight breathing

I would count like prayer.

Each finger, each toe

Each freckle on her forehead

And because I know these things,

because I can feel them already

aching inside me like phantom limbs,

I cannot meet her.

splitting puddles into oil slick mirrors,

blowing out fumes where bubbles should be,

running across land that has forgotten breath

a girl left to apologise for sins of man

Love is not always a door.

Sometimes it is a barricade.

Sometimes it is standing in the burning house

and deciding

not to call another soul inside.

She will never learn my voice,

never inherit the storms,

never discover how loneliness

can become hereditary.

But somewhere, in the unwritten dark,

she remains perfect

unhurt, unafraid,

unmarred by the chemical cathedral

of being alive.

And I will mourn her anyway.

Not as a child who died,

but as a child so beloved

I could not bear