By: Megan “MegLynn” Moss
My mother bore me in the season
the crows stopped calling.
Said I came out with my mouth open
and my fists clenched, already unwilling.
She stitched my name into the hem
of every dress she handed down,
a threadbare prophecy:
You will want what I wanted. You will give as I gave.
As if womanhood were a wound passed down in lace.
But I did not bloom the way she hoped.
Did not soften. Did not open.
Inside me,
the seeds shrivel.
The soil refuses.
A garden gone fallow
by its own design.
In another life,
they would call this a curse.
A barrenness. A divine punishment.
But I do not believe in stories written
by men with full bellies and empty hands.
I believe in the myth
of the mother who ran
barefoot through the olive groves,
her womb still echoing
with no.
They say creation
is the holiest thing a woman can do.
But I have made poems, fire and freedom.
I am not a cradle. I am undoing a lineage that never asked if I wanted to continue.
Let the line end with me. Let the silence be sacred.
Megan Moss is a writer and poet from Kingston, Oklahoma. She has been published in her university’s literary journal Originals, The Madison Review, and has been a featured reader at the Wednesday Night Poetry event in Hot Springs, Arkansas. She is currently a senior at East Central University in Ada, Oklahoma, majoring in English.