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Poetry

As for the love of beautiful creatures

Eve Esfandiari-Denney

A poem from the pamphlet My Bodies This Morning This Evening by Eve Esfandiari-Denney,  published by Bad Betty Press in March 2022.

 

………  ….I believe in a bag of wet bikinis,
the tradition of sadness,
that everywhere is a mother dying
as a mother does forever mutilated

and sleeping, spinning light and organs like ribbons
leaving the TV screen. I told my mother let them

push the needle in. That armada
of cancers inside her, building one more
hard yellow mountain. I hoped every 4am

a Hoopoe bird would land on her body,
its wings could slap
the skin of her chest to give rhythm;

Where is

hope beyond the cabbage patch,        where are you going.

All the while the new season is turning its dirt,
Spring has begun, and to think
I had once been live in her belly, a sack of organs

inside one of hers. Just like a girl on a stretcher
you could have considered me a civilian
when they found me blood-bodied, panting

rolling around on my back
exposing my stomach in submission. My

Mother. I dug out these daffodils
with my mouth for her
during those Aprils which I trusted
would not end her life until I made it back.

She was meant to see the petals unharden
to bloom like a bomb;
here is the sound of Spring going silent.

 

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