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.