It’s Not That I Can’t Have Children

It’s not that I can’t have children
that my body is not a house—
it’s just that my life
never had the chance to make room,
did not open in a way to make itself a womb,
the timing of years between my lover and mine,
the age of different periods of mothering inclining
and declining at the same time,

there just was never the solid enough ground of myself
or the chance even,
a man               was not in the cards
and I never even played from that deck,
so it never really became
a possibility,
and I am almost at the apex of this want,
this deep yearning to hold a child of my own flesh and bone,
to make my body a home—

but perhaps that proverbial ship has sailed,
and the life that I have created
is the life I have                        the life I love.
Perhaps my womb has turned outwards somehow,
and my heart is fertility itself.

Perhaps I have always been a mother
without a human child,
searching for my children in the trees,
in the understory of ancient forests,
hidden under smooth stones,
in warm fur-covered bodies,
in wing tuft and claw,
in the exoskeletons of nymphs,
phylums that lack a sort of mothering I can give,
and so I tend to the wild ones,
I mother other kingdoms,
rock every other species to sleep—
the green and howl and pulse and bloom.

It’s not that I can’t have children,
it’s that I already do.