Asked for no heart
Buried in the Holland landscape
Healthy and strong
Roots tunneling into the earth
Fingers grow new lives
Pain-free flowers
Germination of the soul
Insects hide beneath her skin
Fluttering, fostering fungus
She bakes in the sun
Her leaves grow each season
Each a life she cannot keep
She bears the weight of outliving her children
She hates the flowers
They sing and she cannot
They die and she cannot
They have each other, and she has no one
In the day she is visited by families with small children.
They steal her fruits before they're ripe.
Babies taken away, used to feed.
Creativity robbed. She is made to produce to eat and be eaten.
Her roots are swollen, fat, angry, throbbing
Every so often a rat trips on an exposed one and bites
Every so often she bites back
She’s earthy
Guttural, sensorially driven
At night couples copulate beneath her
She is wounded, aroused, and relieved her children were not there to see her this way.
Wooden woman begins to wake up
In her own bed, alone
Her joints loosen, form juicy and soft.
Crying, mewling creature beside
Free, without roots.
The crying stops.
She can still feel the squirming bodies, the rhythms of the insects called people.
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