Cows calve, horses foal, goats kid, but women do not child.
Another verb separates us from the noun of it, a distance between
cells that split in my body, my body, and her wet fur on my stomach.

I spent all morning as an animal, all afternoon covering
that knowledge up with dirt and sticks. I scratched
out a hole to bury my shame in. Someday my bones

would be gnawed at by something with fur. I tasted
bitter adrenaline down my throat. l lay with you
haunch to haunch and rolled back my reason. Once our species

could cooperate, we could drop bombs, invent plastic, extract
fossil fuels, burn and burn. Books showed species that could
decimate a herd. Our forward-facing eyes made us predator, but

it all seemed long ago: before we'd transcended to these
insulated rooms and screens. We studied bodies we'd made
extinct as a hobby. It seemed impossible we were still

roaming the countryside, still on the ships with such large
holds. The animals my daughter loves best she distorts with love:
bear's fur matted under an arm, skunk's head misshapen

with sleep. I watch her menagerie fray, try to rethread
the monkey's arm to its body, brush out the horse's tangle
of plastic mane. In her room, I can repair a species. When she

gets older someone will tell her how to groom the animal off
of herself. My body took calcium from my body to make her
milk, I nursed her with my bones. The verb nurse means to care

for in illness, to drink too long a single drink, to keep
a grudge too closely. Her cells and mine changed places,
I extracted my elements to feed her. What could be

wilder than the body of a mother? Believe in my bones the risk
I feel. Weather the new war our culture tells us not to speak
of. But my body knows to go outside in an earthquake, to huddle

down when the wind blows. To bite. To keen. To howl.
from the journal AMERICAN POETRY REVIEW
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Cover of Jane Mead's book, To The Wren: Collected and New
"And Then Music:" Jane Mead's Collected Poems

"[T]he ancient lyre, its voice made of wind streaming through trees and grasses — into air articulate — is closest, I believe, to Jane Mead’s authentic 'instrument.' In similar polyphony, she occasions thunder, fire, discordance, explosive ruptures in atmosphere and human relations. She 'conducts' her thinking in her poems—and thus in each poem’s musical gesturing, she also 'conducts' the reader."

via LOS ANGELES REVIEW OF BOOKS
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Image of the cover of Marjorie Welish's book, The Windows Flew Open
What Sparks Poetry:
Prageeta Sharma on Marjorie Welish's "Some Street Cries"

“In Welish’s work I saw an embrace of the most wild, abstract and observational in Stevens, informed with her renewed freshness in constructing the image and its possible abstract correlative. She creates her own set of notes in her poems. Her book The Windows Flew Open broadened my universe of what the poem could be and hold as its subject: a language fueled from living in the mind."
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