She's not "maternal," she's dangerous.
                                   - Jamaal May

I have no charms.  Admittedly.
No gold comb can move through
This mane.  My skin is not translucent.
Mine is a tail to fear.  I know.
And though a mother may destroy,
She too sees fit to create beauty
That would eventually grow into forms
I would swallow if I gave in
To my hungers.  Nothing will come
Of this womb.  But, up from my wounds--
From this goat's body--
Up from my wood-smoke lungs, from
The milk of me, comes a song, a melody
To open yours, then lick them clean.

    - Vievee Francis

if music is the sound of fingertips 
hitting a jug 
in which someone once 
carried water

mother 
what purpose 
in my growing beyond
your dream of my birth?

many times i’ve watched you 
have it, the dream in the garden 
where i emerge:

an old wooden clothespin 
with cornsilk hair

you clip me to your breast then, 
as if to jumpstart it

and after    throw me away 
for a reason i have not yet figured out

mother i was born with a body 
thickly settled, dense 
as a pomegranate

not a fruit steeped in the syrup 
it will taste of

i was already hard 
with the things 
i had selected for myself

inside you i was 
choosing and discarding
without lifting
a finger, i was 

like the girl
in the department 
store, deciding what 
to steal
​
    - Francesca Preston

...thank you zinnia, and gooseberry, rudbeckia
and pawpaw, Ashmead’s kernel, cockscomb
and scarlet runner, feverfew and lemonbalm;
thank you knitbone and sweetgrass and sunchoke
and false indigo whose petals stammered apart
by bumblebees good lord please give me a minute...
and moonglow and catkin and crookneck
and painted tongue and seedpod and johnny jump-up;
thank you what in us rackets glad
what gladrackets us;

and thank you, too, this knuckleheaded heart, this pelican heart,
this gap-toothed heart flinging open its gaudy maw
to the sky, oh clumsy, oh bumblefucked,
oh giddy, oh dumbstruck,
oh rickshaw, oh goat twisting
its head at me from my peach tree’s highest branch,
balanced impossibly gobbling the last fruit,
its tongue working like an engine,
a lone sweet drop tumbling by some miracle
into my mouth like the smell of someone I’ve loved;

....and thank you the way my father one time came back in a dream
by plucking the two cables beneath my chin
like a bass fiddle’s strings
and played me until I woke singing,
no kidding, singing, smiling,
thank you, thank you,

...and you, again you, for hanging tight, dear friend.
I know I can be long-winded sometimes.
I want so badly to rub the sponge of gratitude
over every last thing, including you, which, yes, awkward,
the suds in your ear and armpit, the little sparkling gems
slipping into your eye. Soon it will be over,

which is precisely what the child in my dream said,
holding my hand, pointing at the roiling sea and the sky
hurtling our way like so many buffalo,
who said it’s much worse than we think,
and sooner; to whom I said
no duh child in my dreams, what do you think
this singing and shuddering is,
what this screaming and reaching and dancing
and crying is, other than loving
what every second goes away?
Goodbye, I mean to say.
And thank you. Every day.

    - Ross Gay