To celebrate National Poetry Month, we are happy to present Poetry Daily’s April Celebration: 30Presses/30Poets (#ArmchairBookFair21). Please join us for new poetry from the presses that sustain us. We thank you for reading and hope you will consider supporting poets and poetry this month, and every month. Please be well.
fat girl nicks herself shaving in the shower, resents the water that will carry her blood to sea. Blood, worthless currency, cannot buy a country but becomes it, platelets stitching into streets. fat girl weeps for the blood that won't return— how many mothers have tried such a homecoming, sons and daughters inking the tarry streets? fat girl becomes a mother through her looking, has seen too many children mangled by a sense of justice. She carries somebody's child in the crater their deaths create inside her—if she could just reach deep enough, if she could piecemeal her own plump, how many layers would it take to make a bulletproof lung? fat girl mourns the blood muling a persistent path through the drainpipes. If blood must be taken, let there be coral glittering like gemstones at their feet, dolphins pitching foam in arcs out from the sea. Let there be air enough. fat girl could be a mother, fretting the impossible journey of her blood.
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