After the yellow bus gathers my girl
and the sun tears through a sky
of rough linen, I make my rounds
in her room, picking up cast-off selves
sweatpant snakeskins and hooded chrysalises
tee-shirt seedpods tossed and crushed
when I see it:
the brown-red trail
dark and carnal, in a twisted
husk of underthings
long tongue (unspeaking, unsung)
that I peel off
and curl
into itself
white sticky dispatch, ready for the bin.
It’s a wonder to know
her blood time has come as mine is
going, that I can pass back
the torch, bright birthright, unspoken
the tender violent splitting
open
the way she arrived, so quickly
tiny sprinter
the midwife nearly missed her
and the doula could only watch
eyes wide as thighs parted
and my girl cleaved her passage
head first and blood-streaked and
roaring into this world.
Wendy Kagan lives and writes in a converted barn in New York's Catskill mountain foothills. Her poems have appeared in ONE ART: a journal of poetry, The Baffler, and elsewhere. Wendy holds an MA in English with a focus on American poetry from Columbia University. She was named a finalist for the David Wade Hogue Poetry Scholarship Martha Award in 2022, and her chapbook Blood Moon Aria was long-listed for the Yellow Arrow Publishing 2024 chapbook competition.