Arielle Greenberg - I Live in the Country & other dirty poems

First I wanted to be pregnant, to breed, to extend past the length of my own bruised limb, to sow, to expand everywhere like a broke-up seed, to burst in the dirt of it all. First I wanted to birth, to moan and quicken with the moon and squat in the dawn and push and scream the names of gods I never cared about before, to pop the blood in my eyes with the effort, to split in half up the ass, to come as close to death as possible, to loll a head out of my vagina and squat there, doubled, mothered, knowing it. First I wanted to mother, to eat the smell of new skin, to feed this babefrom my own calloused and bitten inches, to feed on its love, to never sleep, to sleep like fur, to obsess, to squirt milk when I made myself cum in the dim few hours alone. First I did not want to cum. I wanted to do nothing but nurse and sleep and not-sleep and prod gently at my other body as if it were a fossil beneath the deflated and heavy fat of my body, and to mother. I wanted to mother that baby right up.

First my baby stood up and stopped nursing and I wept and let my arms hang down and went for a run and my body excavated itself from the extra fat and something sparked in me, a flint that was that other kind of animal sense again, tiger bear firefly wolf bunny buffalo bitch in heat, that was my libido that wanted to fuck, and I set the baby aside in a safe warm nest and went out hunting. Again and again. A cycle of seasons, of mating and fucking and sleeping dormant and breeding and raising up cubs and sniffing their slipperiest hairs, their powdery drool of wanting. It comes. It flows. When I am full of a child, and then when my arms are newly full of a new child, we are a bubble on a stream, and I am practically nothing but milk and lowing.

Then the child walks and the milk dries and my body thins and all I can think about is skin and tongues and fat andmuscle again. And then I want to fuck and I want to cum and I want to be knocked up and I want to only carry this baby so its heartbeat is directly up against my heartbeat and I want to sleep and I want to run in the mud and I want to dance and I want to eat red meat and I want to fuck. Because first, blessedly, I am an animal.