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.
