MATRICIDE *
by Jessica Khailo
Our pain wants us to love them,
burrowed deep between our eyes,
spiked tails thrashing with synaptic fury.
“Notice me, mother,” it whispers
while I crash through all my mirrors,
sloughing off my silhouette,
whose calcination triggers clinging
to its substrate. Dissolution
sustains itself with writhing,
but it ends.
The serpent, too, has cried us out
and watched us die a billion deaths
through countless mythic cycles.
So we think that maybe, if we spoke
in softer tones, and didn’t cause a fuss,
she’d feel obliged to love us.
She’d call forth the golgi apparatus
to guide us through her fiery membrane.
But the mother fears shrinking;
She wants to exist.
Pray on it, darling.
This stone in the vestibule,
the archons won’t move for you.
It must be dissolved, absorbed by the body
with crying so purple, delirious, primordial,
your blood is flushed with oxytocin
and your swollen breasts let down
their prismatic, opal fountains.
Cradle this colicky genesis
and let it kill its mother.
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(*This poem was first published in Door = Jar magazine, issue 26, Spring 2023)