Once, there lived a girl who vomited sacrifices

of women upon whose bodies her dreams were built.

Mother would only demand her

to listen to wet cheeks. Every morning,

she would wake up wanting to apologize

for wanting. Scattered marbles of desire

would roll in the mildly lit corridors of her stomach.

Her fridge would only open to dying fruit and a confession

of treating her body badly. Every night, she would cut

the stomach of the fish she caught, chunks of them stuck in her nails.

One day, out of loneliness, she attempted

to learn mothertongue/mother’s tongue,

but her tongue became a beehive,

carrying the grief of her mother and mother’s mother

and all the mothers before them whose wombs she had been in.

That night, she birthed with difficulty

her first poem and stared at its full head of hair

as its screams and the wolves’ racket created song.

She walked to the graveyard and gifted

her words to her ancestors,

thanked them for the pen that was a boat,

the ink that was the oars,

and set on a journey

across the oceans free of seasickness.