Mother Land
by Haylee Morman
Kentucky is a strange Mother.
She is cold, gray, jagged with natural
rock walls the gods would envy. She is frigid,
blistering, all heat, all ice. She has skipping stone freckles
from her days under the smiling summer sun,
swimming in murky brown ponds and crystalline
creeks. She has hummingbirds in her broken soil palms
and dirt in her hair, on her face, under
her bare feet. There are ashen pits carved
into her fingers, where her nails of coal
were cut out of her loving body. She is plump
in the summer months, ripe with undulating curves
but is gaunt come winter, all wire smoldering
under sagging fabric flesh. She has pleated waves
of strawberry vine hair, ever-so-delicately kissed by the sun.
Her eyes are shards of stained glass
cemented together into a haphazard kaleidoscope
of greens and blues and browns. She is natural.
She is industrial. She is brazen and stoic
and a hippie and a hillbilly and a politician.
She is everything and nothing, the sun
around which we rotate and the lone asteroid
swirling in the rivers of ice found on the fringes
of our galaxy. She is loved and hated
and feared and celebrated. She birthed me
through her own children’s bodies, nourished me
with her honeysuckle kisses, and kept watch over me from
the unflowered tulip poplars. And one day, hopefully
far from now, I will repay my debt to her,
returning the body I loaned so she may birth her next child.