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Macabre No. 1

Mother’s got her tits out again,
waiting for a raven to pass her by.
Mother’s having a dream that I
am the raven, a room outside the
fluttering and gigantic person she
has become. Mother thinks flight
is bald. Mother thinks the raven is
a river and me her baby I shall ever be.
The slick siren slipping from night–
the stars, make one home for glass.
Me, petaled and falling from the womb
in verse. Mother raven wants a glass baby.
But me is a baby I shall ever be.
Raven’s mother is angry,
she slashed a bloom of blush into my face.
I am embarrassed to be growing faster
than mothers tits. Her raven has a nest for one–
cold chastity of father Earth decorated
in pillows of full and mulching eggs.
The milk is sour. Is sour tomorrow.
Love is like this sometimes.
And even love breathes and discovers a
mirror. Mother’s undressing herself with her
borrowed pair of eyes. Their scarves
and itchy wool. Silken hats that cover
the hole in existential awe on the face.
What a humid summer this year will be.

Macabre No. 2

At the moth mouth mother
swathes the grassland to tend to her
own ribs,
heavy and fat with human life.
In the weeds she finds a honeycomb,
mother bee–
jagged in charisma and light-lengths,
some sweet, some gold, some
tied at the nervous underground
of inconceivable circumstances.
There is tranquility on the surface
where I am cocooned like a starling,
anxious for narrow flight and looking
out into the grid of natural plexus.
Translucency hollows,
the morgue born effortlessly into
the tongue, as if it’s death that lifts
us all along the spine of the kid.
Letting go is difficult and is the only
thing I will take with me
into the afterlife.

Macabre No. 3

The children are alive with the sound of burial.
I beat my tonsils on the tapestry of change,
without expecting it to appear as the daughter
of magic. Pores slurp the dew out of the fresh
rotten mouth. Cottonmouths and watermelons
sit at the base of the pubis, waiting for me,
mother with a stomach full of pumpkin. No.
Era berried, wildly married. I am made
of such a young love that I am fearful mother
might believe I was only a fever dream.
Her big body grimacing at the sight of the
unseeable, like Neptune carried in jelly.
I am coaxed by the raven to join death
and hope that tonight mother grasps the
Earth to belong in its hair, while looking
into the sky with me in mind–
as surely it does not have a roof, and me,
mother’s baby shall I ever be.

N. Flaherty Kimball

IG: @poetgirl94

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