by Nik Moore

She was collected, eventually,
at the neighbor boy’s behest.

Back on the ground they smashed robin eggs
one by one into dirt—little monsters.

What it would have been like for them both
to be boys, to hold their fathers’ middle names.

Instead, her vulva—denying
at her birth some eager prayer.

The children showed themselves for the first time
in the side-yard near the broken yolks

and she saw for the first time
that difference on her body,

worked to slink out of the skin,
its slow ripening toward

that silhouette of a pregnant body
on her mother’s lotion bottle.

Today sees an unhealed wound
where the plum tree was years ago felled.

And how impossible it suddenly seems
to go back, to be the girl sitting up high

in those leaves—who were not yet sick, not yet
rotting, not yet asking questions of the yard.

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Nik Moore (they/them) is a Kentucky poet and an alum of the MFA program in Creative Writing at the University of Montana. They work as a college writing instructor and as an editor at Many Nice Donkeys. Poems of Nik's have appeared in or are forthcoming from Olney, GASHER, Poetry Northwest, A Literary Field Guide to Northern Appalachia, and elsewhere.