Free My Mother's Body by Marge Piercy

They inhabit me
    I am pregnant with certain deaths
    of women who choked before they
    could speak their names
    could know their names
    before they had names to know.
    I am owl, the spirit said,
    I swim through the darkness on wide wings.
    I see what is behind me
    as well as what is before.
    In the morning a splash of blood
    on the snow marks where I found
    what I needed. In the mild
    light of day the crows mob
    me, cursing. Are you the daughter
    of my amber clock-tower eyes?
    I am pregnant with certain deaths
    of women whose hands were replaced
    by paper flowers, which must be kept
    clean, which could tear on a glance,
    which could not hold even water.
    I am cat. I rub your prejudices
    against the comfortable way they grow.
    I am fastidious, not as a careful
    housewife, but as a careful lover,
    keeping genitals as clean as face.
    I turn up my belly of warm sensuality
    to your fingers, purring my pleasure
    and letting my claws just tip out.
    Are you the daughter of the fierce
    aria of my passion scrawled on the night?
    I am pregnant with certain deaths
    of women who dreamed that the lover
    would strike like lightning and throw
    them over the saddle and carry them off.
    It was the ambulance that came.
    I am wolf. I call across the miles
    my messages of yearning and hunger,
    and the snow speaks to me constantly
    of food and want and friend and foe.
    The iron air is heavy with ice
    tweaking my nose and the sound
    of the wind is sharp and whetted.
    Commenting, chatting, calling,
    we run through the net of scents
    querying, Are you my daughter?
    I am pregnant with deaths of certain
    women who curled, wound in the skeins
    of dream, who secreted silk
    from spittle and bound themselves
    in swaddling clothes of shrouds.
    I am raccoon. I thrive in woods,
    I thrive in the alleys of your cities.
    With my little hands I open
    whatever you shut away from me.
    On your garbage I grow glossy.
    Among packs of stray dogs I bare
    my teeth, and the warring rats part.
    I flourish like the ailanthus tree;
    in your trashheaps I dig underground
    castles. Are you my daughter?
    I am pregnant with certain deaths
    of women who wander slamming doors
    and sighing as if to be overheard,
    talking to themselves like water left
    running, tears dried to table salt.
    They hide in my hair like crabs,
    they are banging on the nodes of my spine
    as on the door of a tardy elevator.
    They want to ride up to the observation
    platform and peer out my eyes for the view.
    All this wanting creates a black hole
    where ghosts and totems whirl and join
    passing through into antimatter of art,
    the alternate universe in which such certain
    deaths as theirs and mine throb with light.

The Annuity
1 .
    When I was fifteen we moved
    from a tight asbestos shoebox
    to a loose drafty two-story house,
    my own tiny room prized under the eaves.
    My privacy formed like a bud from the wood.
    In my pale green womb I scribbled
    evolving from worm to feral cat,
    gobbling books, secreting bones,
    building a spine one segment
    at a time out of Marx and Freud.
    Across the hall the roomers lived,
    the couple from Appalachia who cooked
    bacon in their room. At a picnic
    she miscarried. I held her
    in foaming blood. Lost twins.
    Salesmen, drab, dirty in the bathroom,
    solitary, with girly magazines,
    detective stories and pads of orders,
    invoices, reports that I would inherit
    to write my poems on;
    overgrown boys dogging you
    out to the backyard with the laundry
    baskets; middle-aged losers with eyes
    that crawled under my clothes
    like fleas and made me itch;
    those who paid on time and those
    with excuses breaking out like pimples
    at the end of the month.
    I slammed my door and left them,
    ants on the dusty plain.
    For the next twenty years
    you toted laundry down two flights,
    cleaned their bathroom every morning,
    scrubbed at the butt burns,
    sponged up the acid of their complaints
    read their palms and gave common
    sense advice, fielded their girlfriends,
    commiserated with their