I’m behind in both completing “Writing in the Dark’s” WANTED intensive and in sharing the pieces I’m writing each week, but I guess that’s the beauty of self-paced workshops—you can complete them on your own time!

Below is the piece I wrote for Week 2: Sex Without Love and the Unruly Body. Note that despite week two’s title, the lesson and prompts were NOT about writing sex poems, though it was a route writers could take, if desired. The focus was more on the feeling of desire in the body. As someone who has no plans to have children, I was surprised that I wrote a poem about the body’s desire to feel the weight of a newborn baby. But I think I know where it’s coming from . . .

I’m currently working on a manuscript in which the ocean is personified as a woman, with some poems in particular painting her as a mother. Thus, motherhood on the brain.

(Want a little bonus content? I’m sharing some of the editing process between my initial piece and this “final” version on my Patreon ! Available for both free and paid subscribers.)

A Body Is a Mother

Is this what they mean
when they say the desire
for motherhood is innate?
Imagining breasts as nourishment,
cushion for a ripened-pear
skull only, nothing more?
Is this what they mean
when they say the body ticks
with age, the last egg dropped
like shattered hope?
That despite knowing
I would never want children,
I’d want, just once, to feel
the bunched weight of my own
womb-shaped newborn
against my chest?
Skin to skin. Mine, still moist
with lotion, loose with age;
hers, like risen dough.
How my breastbone might leave
its imprint in her like a thumb
to clay, while hers leaves
no visible mark, only that clean
baby smell, the sweet milk
breath. I want to feel her
soft-boned legs scrunch against
my abdomen, as if trying
to curl her way back inside me.
To be the shell that cradles
her snail body, both plush
landing and armor. 
I never wanted to be a mother.
I only wanted to be an ocean.
To know what it feels like
to be the salt instead of the buoy.