Mothers

Women used to wean their babies
By painting their breasts black.
Hurricane clouds are black.
The Earth is weaning us.

Sometimes I want the mother
Of the man I love to walk
In on us so she knows
He’s mine & no longer hers.

My son asks me what it would be
Like if he were a scorpion, a
Shark, or a black widow &
I had to give birth to these animals
& then give them my breast milk.

I think it’s interesting that it’s the
Size of our minds that makes
Childbirth so dangerous;
The bigness of our brains
Sometimes kills our mothers.

The Congolese rainforest is the
Wet, nurturing heart pumping
Oxygen for the world.
It’s also where we got the radioactive stone
For the bombs on Nagasaki & Hiroshima.

I stand in the courtyard & look up
& see that the weather in the top of the trees
Is different from the weather down below.