What Kind of Woman

by Kate Baer

(Did you know when you bait a deer it’s called a violation, but when you poison a girl it’s called a date.)

You can be a mother and a poet. A wife and a lover. You can dance on the graves you dug on Tuesday, pulling out the bones of yourself you began to miss. You can be the sun and the moon. The dance a victory song.

You are not somebody’s otherness. This is not a dress rehearsal before a better kind of life.

Nothing Tastes as Good as Skinny Feels Unless you count your grandmother’s cake, hand mixed while she waits for the sound of your breath at the door. Or if you consider the taste of the sea, arms raised while you enter, salt at your lips. Or maybe you’ve forgotten the taste of a lover, your mouth on his skin. I ask— have you ever tasted the cool swill of freedom? The consuming rush of a quiet, radical love.

Imagine if we took back our diets, our grand delusions, the time spent thinking about the curve of our form. Imagine if we took back every time we called attention to one or the other: her body, our body, the bad shape of things. Imagine the minutes that would stretch into hours. Day after day stolen back like a thief. Imagine the power of loose arms and assurance. The years welcomed home in a soft, cotton dress.

At any given moment there is someone getting what they always wanted.

Some nights she walks out to the driveway where the lilacs bloom and lies down on the warm pavement even though the neighbors will see and wonder what kind of woman does such things.

That even in our darkest hours, I still wait for the sound of your feet at the door.

For now just remember how you felt the day you were born: desperate for magic, ready to love.

What I meant when I said “I don’t have time” is that every minute that passes I’m disappointing someone

I have always been hungry; fingers dipped in sugar, salt across my lips. Four children have passed through my body and still here I am, asking for your hands on my hips, voice in my ear. For melon and honey cream. For you to not make love to me. Take me— but wait until I plead. There is nothing like the impatient thrum of wanting. All legs and foaming mouth.

The moment in the argument when the only sound between us is the buzz of locusts, cars from a passing street, God licking her fingertips, wondering how this is going to go.

To find the ones who say, I am not afraid of sitting in the dark with you.

Experience will teach you two things: you are the mother and it’s okay to let them go up the slide.

For now just remember: birds sing, babies cry, and no matter the weather, every morning is new.

Motherload She keeps an office in her sternum, the flat bone in the center of her chest with all its urgent papers, vast appointments, lists of minor things. In her vertebrae she holds more carnal tasks: milk jugs, rotten plants, heavy- bottomed toddlers in all their mortal rage. She keeps frustration in her hallux: senseless chatter, jealous fangs, the spikes of a dinosaur’s tail. The belly is more complicated—all heartache and ambition. Fires and tidal waves. In her pelvis she holds her labors, long and slippery. In her clavicle, silent things. (Money and power. Safety and choice. Tiny banquets of shame.) In her hands she carries their egos, small and flimsy. In her mouth she holds their laughter, gentle currents, a cosmos of everything.

Where do we go when the beams of our ship have rotted?

I do not remember being born or how I knew my mother’s face. Only that we woke to the sound of pots banging against the stove, knowing she would be downstairs.

Maybe he is just a man walking or maybe he is searching for a bird to break. How many have already been broken? Let us count their wings.

How does a mother hold her terrors?

Life will rough you up. Throw you to the shore like a wave crashing—sand in your hair, blood in your teeth.