the cycle by ava min

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.