On a daughter I will never have:
I refuse motherhood.
Grief grows in my stomach
to supplant her absence.
I think of gardens—
Heavy quilts woven against Earth’s shiver—
and her roots beginning under me.
I fear glass.
A barbed portrait of my face
paints her: fragile.
I wish for life,
but I watch as skeletons drag destruction’s
infantile descent upon her home.
I love her
as much as my mother loved me, and so
I will deliver her birth from death.
I miss her
as much as I miss me, but
this emerald womb will remain empty.
-Iris