the cycle

ava min | Fall 2023

I’m so scared to have kids, ma. but– “no one will know the violence it took to become this gentle.” something maternal and raging inside me, the forget-me chemicals, tells me that this might be true: that the cycle will end with me because I know it is there.

but I inherit it, the violence; it is in you and therefore in both of us. I am capable of it and this I know because I was already inside of you at your birth, in the form of an egg within your infantile uterus. thus something unbegun but already decided. will you laugh if I ask you this, is your blood my blood. I think, I am what might have been you on the mantle. you lost your doctorate– birthed it. your husband unsatisfied– you birthed it; my libido. you couldn’t feel the world pulsing beneath your fingers, strung raw, so you birthed that too– I feel everything, ma. the stars in the universe in my thighs and my breasts. but unlike the women who eat their placentas I am afraid you birthed me to separate all the possibilities from yourself, that you ripped me clean from your carnal being– to frame or execute, I don’t know– like the brown in the toilet. the diploma in the box. the fumes out the window.

– and all you have to do is flush.

don’t worry.

we are only mother and daughter until one of us forgets.