I'm good with children -- an axiom,

A loom that weaves tapestries of branching fates:

One depicts a teacher,

Another, a counselor,

A third, a nanny,

And all, a Mother.

I read myself into the rye fields:

Catching all of the children, saving them from the abyss below

Teeming with half-truths and cynicism and shame -- 

The hallmarks of adulthood.

Like Holden, my happy place resounds with children's laughter,

And no one falls, no one cries (for long),

No one mourns.

 

But the miasma of reality creeps in,

Seeps in via bullet holes,

And knife-slit throats,

And empty plates on dinner tables,

And settle like thoughts and prayers...

Thoughts and prayers.

Headlines and photographs and viral videos

Crawl across the sky of my Eden

To bar the gateway with flaming swords like we don't belong.

I flee on barbed narrows strewn with smallish corpses,

And a coil deep in my gut winds tighter --

And I swear that that is what pregnancy feels like.

 

Every month like clockwork I am reminded of my own fertility;

My womb mourns its disuse, while

My heart rejoices its completion.

What a terrble thing to raise a child in this world.

What a negligent, egoistic whim to spark life in this void

With all of this -- this all to fear.