A. E. Abitz
Always when, not if.
Bound to multiply
like some Adam & Eve fuck-puppet
show where trees don’t grow
money or fruit
~
& some of you rave
at the state of the nation
yet can’t seem to shake
the manic maladaptive
solipsism of making more
me
like some endocrine-slip devouring
rationality especially
because you can’t forget mommy’s
every mistake and you
just know you could do it better
~
But to me it seems that yielding
my entire self
is too much. I mean, how can mother
toe the line between maker
and potentiality? I mean: my mother
always wanted children.
Married at nineteen respectably
had me at twenty-three gave herself
completely but now I’m grown and see
her whole hollowed-out serving-platter
of latent wishes and could-be’s—
and though never once told me
she wished she’d done differently—
just imagine a quarter-century of belonging
to someone else entirely…
‡‡
A. E. ABITZ is an MFA student in poetry at Emerson College. She holds a BFA in poetry from Texas Tech University, where she received the Stephen Ross Huffman Poetry Award in 2021. Her poems have appeared in The Dewdrop, Beyond Words Magazine, and SQN, where she was selected as a finalist in their Inaugural Poetry Competition. Her critical writing appears in Fork Apple Press. She is Art Director and Print Editor for Redivider.
Union Spring Literary Review 