Who can blame them?
For calling like banshees
after years underground,
making public the very
private act of living?
Their amber, alien husks
parade up the maple
in our front yard.
You help with dinner,
where I teach you
to hold a knife
by teaching you
not to hold a knife.
But you insist, so
shape one hand
like a claw, the other
rocks a knife whose blade
never leaves the board.
Eclosion must be painful,
a split straight down
the rigor mortis shell.
The first time you do anything
I hover, ready to
staunch the bleeding
or secure the blade.
Our species has
the longest childhood,
all this time above ground,
laughing into porch lit nights,
idly walking around with
our wings at the ready.
Published in Cider Press Review, Volume 26, Issue 2.
Rachel Morgan is the author of the chapbook, Honey & Blood, Blood & Honey (Final Thursday Press, 2017), and her work recently appears in the anthology Fracture: Essays, Poems, and Stories on Fracking in America (Ice Cube Press, 2017) and in Prairie Schooner, Alaska Quarterly Review, Boulevard, Mid-American Review, Barrow Street, and elsewhere. She was the winner of the 2021 Fineline contest, and recipient of a fellowship at Vermont Studio Center. She is a graduate of the Iowa Writers’ Workshop. Currently she teaches at the University of Northern Iowa and is the Poetry Editor for the North American Review.
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