after “After” by Emily Pittinos
My mother
is not my mother
because she is not
her own. She belongs
to thrown pots
and the maggots crawling
down my spine, to chewed
nails and unwashed hair. Everything
she touches rots and blossoms
with larvae and caterpillars.
She is of the night
and juxtaposing
the places our minds wander
with the riptide. I am combining
what lasts of the furniture
with the puddles of water
left from wherever
we last left
things and waiting.
Watching for the sky
to shift as I realize
none of us were
exactly human.Please note that the formatting of this poem may break on small screens, so we have made a PDF version available.
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Kaydance Rice (she/her) is a writer from Grand Rapids, Michigan and currently attending Interlochen Arts Academy. Her work can be found or is forthcoming in The Ice Lolly Review, voicemail poems, Cargoes, and Élan Magazine. Kaydance is also a prose editor for Surging Tide Magazine and staff contributor for The Lunar Journal. In her free time, Kaydance enjoys playing the viola, rambling about existentialism, and spending time with her plants.