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Apr 2011
We are manufactured landscapes,
constructed through naming nouns –
we celebrate difference.
We are compelled into being one or the other,
like a nail or a hammer.

We reference nature through motherhood,
voluptuous in her national pride narrative,
her lips red pucker supple metaphors like her fertile ground,
her belly always pregnant
ready to plant desire in discourse.

We forget her industrial miscarriages,
her toxic tar-sulfur consumption,
her global half-bred garbage in words left unsaid,
her ***** laundry in patriarchal hands.

We forget her midwives,
her toiling underpaid workers
who support generations of waste
who spit up truth in plastic mouthfuls,
who regurgitate material narratives
to celebrate flesh in mythic wholeness.

When will the nation, earth and world step from its subject of motherly pedestal and name its androgynous existence, its forgotten lifelines?
Carly Salzberg
Written by
Carly Salzberg  Buffalo, N.Y.
(Buffalo, N.Y.)   
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