Fertility (Harvest)

Love is not understanding.
Love is wrapping the aperture of an eye inside your ribcage.
It is imagining.

Audrey and I are fertile, mother.
We trail our newborns behind us.
            Fully formed and watertight.
            They have no eyes to stop up.

Her infants are sealed, heavy, impenetrable,
            and mine are made of thoughts.
They are all for conjecture.

Yes, mother, there is space inside our breasts,
            fields lying fallow below our beating hearts,
            but you look at us like canyons sometimes,
                        like filling us with husbands and progeny
                        will make us knowable.

But love is not knowing.
It is the awareness of terror and of darkness.

We are weary of being tolerated.
Finished with watching you search our faces for cracks.
We have left you bread crumbs like children
            to the source of us.
And you have turned your head away,
            blinking.

We are valleys, mother,
            and we are grown-in.
We see your cheekbones swiveling away
and we know we have loved what we made.


Lynsey.Griswold

Lynsey G. is a writerly type whose work in journalism, creative nonfiction, and poetry has appeared in Stirring: A Literary Collection, Menacing Hedge, Sound Lit Mag, TOSKA, Bitch magazine, Nerve.com, and elsewhere. She blogs for Luna Luna Mag and LynseyG.com, does daily battle with the New York subway system, and enjoys sci-fi, Gothic fiction, vegetarianism, and bourbon–not necessarily in that order.

 


 

Lynsey Griswold
Lynsey G. is a writerly type whose work in journalism, creative nonfiction, and poetry has appeared in Stirring: A Literary Collection, Menacing Hedge, Sound Lit Mag, TOSKA, Bitch magazine, Nerve.com, and others. She blogs for Luna Luna Mag and LynseyG.com, does daily battle with the New York subway system, and enjoys sci-fi, Gothic fiction, vegetarianism, and bourbon--not necessarily in that order.