She takes a lolly snake,
slides it into her mouth
and with her pink tongue
ties it in a knot.

I take to the corner,
stoop into it heavily
and with heaving anxiety
my intestines do the same trick.

My mothers painful womb,
cut out and tossed away.
My first home
tossed away with
the surgical waste.
Thrown away
with appendixes
limbs
spleens
the fat from a trophy wife.
My first home.

For five months
you fed me cigarettes
You didn't know that
I had made a home inside you.
I was born tiny
and early.

For two days
I lie naked and incapable
****** and smoke ridden.
Drugged.
I'm a young woman
this time,
but still your infant.

Two days you let me rot
whilst other mothers
brushed their daughters hair
and soothed them.

I lay naked and sore
my hair too matted
for brushing.
My wounds too deep now
for you to soothe.

Other mothers were
checking closets and
under beds
keeping the monsters away

I had no bed
just bloodied carpet
and a monster
that did not hide.

I try to pull you out of me,
try to find out where you live.
Perhaps a hollowed space in my chest
or in the space behind my eye.
You're as far away as you could be
yet you can pull a string,
without even knowing
and the animal buried inside me
writhes.
I search for you,
for the part you left inside me
with broken glass I search
through the fatty tissue.
Then I stop.
Always at that point
as if part of me is scared
i'll reach the bone
and still I won't have found you.