a poem is not something you can pick at with fork tines
my mother is the ability to float in water
growing up is burying the bad taste in a cherry pit
dripping velvet flesh
my womb is puckered like a cherry pit
for now
water was stranded in a crevice as the tide ran back home
turned gravelly beachrock to a forest of pink hermit shells
and swaying anemones and that is my mother
a fork tine is a scalpel in the tide of my womb
my first wound is finding myself a body inside the ocean of my mother
a cherry pit is the bitterness we all spring from
consciousness is a nonlinear poem
the biggest weight is being born with two million eggs but no memories
of the scaly imprint on sand that the tide left as it drew away
through the eyes of my mother
Anna Adhikary is a writer in Tiohtià:ke (Montréal). She is currently studying creative writing at Concordia University. She enjoys writing about magic and in the first person.