After Gino Severini’s Femme et enfant, 1916
I am watching a woman pull her own child from her body. I can’t believe he’s all mine. Woman folds and folds into squares, into herself, disappears. I am a kitchen yellowed tile: bacon, butter and splatter. I am stink and vinegar sting. Woman pulls her own child from her body. Woman in a luxury car, on the back of a motorcycle, pruning in the yard or tub. Folding.
I am a chair. I am leaking petals and leaves from my breast. I once slept in a motel, door cracked open to the outside, chain pulled tight. From the bed, stars glinted through a still creased curtain accidentally left open by an elbow or shoe. On the street, on a pay phone, a passerby stared. Her hair and skirt pocket familiar. She became flowers, then me, then child. And I am watching her watching me.
I am watching a woman pull her own child from her body. We are folding into her. She watches the child at my breast from the screen, from the street, from two towns over my own mother, lips rosed and eye sharp, turns to look. On a patch of brown folding to green surrounded by naked ladies, austere and leafless and foreboding, as though the future has been seen and spoken, woman and child, woman and child, woman and child.
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Allison Blevins is the author of three chapbooks. She is the editor-in-chief of Harbor Review and the poetry editorial assistant at Literary Mama. Her work has appeared in such journals as Mid-American Review and Raleigh Review. She lives in Missouri with her wife and three children.