memmy
Memmy always says her kids are here. Meaning me and my mother. The women—my women—love me with aching wombs. Feverishly itching for their child, they sleepwalk to the bus stop, into the woods, to the kitchen for tea. All of us, never able to rest, are always looking for something beyond the mountains. Beyond the depression we built our homes in. Something to ignore the collision we were born a part of. It comes out in the yell for children late at night, and when, in the haze of Alzheimer’s, we bludgeon squirrels for dinner. So used to starving, we forget the feeling of being satisfied, forget that sometimes we are too full. Hand-in-hand, we dream of wild animals—lions sent to protect us, bats in our houses, a single raven on the telephone line. When we dream of blood, we ask who is pregnant, and when we step in muddy water, we sniff out the death our bloodhounds missed. So it is no wonder that our mountains are swollen, forever pregnant. In the cut of the sediment I see a uterus, in the trees a thought—a feeling. The valley is a cradle, and Appalachia a Mother, leaning over wildly, searching for herself in small brown eyes.