5 Poems from Not Done Burning

Alice ordered all of us
not just one
or some percentage

Alice said there were no babies in poetry then
and how could that have been?
and what are we leaving out now?

Chantal Ackerman said Her body so small, so gaunt and wrapped in her duvet.
My heart hurts. It wasn’t like this before but it is like this and I tell myself it’s
happening, and will happen to me too, most likely.

perhaps everything now, perhaps nothing
left out: the baby and the mother
the mother without a baby

bedroom furniture in apartments
without functional kitchens
eating, not eating, being seen

the sadness of dads
airbnb, end of life
adolescents roving in a group

gauntness, wages that splatter

Danielle’s pain
Lisa’s spine
Caren’s uterus

Leora’s entire pelvis
the sentences of Trisha and Diana and Amy

my diamond of incisions
my insides full of bad candy

a bloody baby person in mesh
lil crone leaning into it
the world that hates them

to see the way it will
and won’t forever

I was a blunt instrument
of the patriarchy
used against it

bellowed and hammered
smelt into a hard serving
platter, compression leggings

my job, even though I couldn’t feel it
email still arrived
offset by a casual salutation

first you’re dumped
then you’re the director
who’s to say which situation benefits

the wheel of fortune turns
depositing liquid ibuprofen
water below streaming dark blue green

barnacled and clinging
lateral and lengthwise
hurtling towards the cliffs of 2025

lil crone: not done burning
not even barely
hardly started

here are the winds that were predicted
by winds that blew before them

here is the vetiver
smoke from a bottle

weather from a radio
sickness after air travel

oral sex at the end of the world
spasms from the bottom of a lung

the only thing that gets me wet
so I stayed in bed and waited

flashing inside a fire
flushing inside a wave

this golden smoky hour
won’t last always

the pain is asymmetric
the baby is in the poem now
but the mother still worries about commissions

commissions, interest, currency

knowing this, lil crone still thought they would have made
a good mother to a human child
as they gave birth to another

instead the first shit after surgery almost tore them apart
they typed it almost tore me apart
& hit send

that is how they became doula to shit
& talking of shit

the closeness of their holes