after Anne Sexton
We’re not all the same. Nowadays we build myths like this: The mother goes home and gives her daughter an egg, in it she’s put her best little shoes. When the daughter comes of age, she has to crack it open to find them. The egg is hard as a cuckoo bird’s, and she’ll have to use her teeth, and when her teeth break, use her hands, and when her hands break, you get the idea; she’ll hide it until her mother comes over one day like, what have you done with that egg? Let’s find a place to put it together, tucked behind your ear or on the mantle.
One day, the daughter will see the egg in the rearview mirror on her way to school, and the egg will be in the books, and she’ll give birth to the egg when she didn’t mean to, it will just plop out until the doctors are like, oh.
And the egg is one-part coffin, like the minivan is one-part coffin, like Kroger, like the body we see on every branch hanging or shouting out: I’m part of you, let me roost in the nest you’re making. Feed me from under your skirt until there’s nothing left there of your wanting but this.
We’re not all the same. Nowadays we build myths like this: The mother goes home and gives her daughter an egg, in it she’s put her best little shoes. When the daughter comes of age, she has to crack it open to find them. The egg is hard as a cuckoo bird’s, and she’ll have to use her teeth, and when her teeth break, use her hands, and when her hands break, you get the idea; she’ll hide it until her mother comes over one day like, what have you done with that egg? Let’s find a place to put it together, tucked behind your ear or on the mantle.
One day, the daughter will see the egg in the rearview mirror on her way to school, and the egg will be in the books, and she’ll give birth to the egg when she didn’t mean to, it will just plop out until the doctors are like, oh.
And the egg is one-part coffin, like the minivan is one-part coffin, like Kroger, like the body we see on every branch hanging or shouting out: I’m part of you, let me roost in the nest you’re making. Feed me from under your skirt until there’s nothing left there of your wanting but this.
Sara Moore Wagner lives in West Chester, OH with her husband and three small children. She is the recipient of a 2019 Sustainable Arts Foundation award, and the author of the chapbooks Tumbling After (forthcoming from Red Bird Chapbooks, 2021) and Hooked Through (2017). Her poetry has appeared or is forthcoming in many journals including Beloit Poetry Journal, Cimarron, Third Coast, Poet Lore, Waxwing, The Cincinnati Review, and Nimrod, among others. She has been nominated multiple times for the Pushcart Prize and Best of the Net. Find her at saramoorewagner.com.