Content Warning: blood
When Gaia got her period on her fourteenth birthday,
She woke up drowning in a pool of blood.
she thought she’d been shot
until trees started growing from her bedsheets
like the life she carried in her womb at twenty-five.
Three nights she laid in a hospital bed.
Get this thing out of me, she prayed.
She woke up in a pool of blood then too.
She first laid her child in the grass with the
dew and bugs and sang to them until her throat dried out.
She carved hills in her skin and then gave her baby a name.
They cried rivers into the hills and valleys that filled the whole ocean inside of her.
She felt love.
They swam away with the fish.
Gaia is not a mother she is a girl.
She is fourteen.
She is full of blood and sea and figs.
She swam away with the trout until they bit her
and pulled her down to the seafloor
where she drowned in her own blood then too.
Her Mother brings out
a pink frosted cake
covered in glitter and “Happy Birthday” written in Red.
Gaia notices the heat from the candles burn her lips
as she blows them out.
Girlhood came to Gaia in the form of cake and flesh.
She doesn’t know what to think of this.
This will just be a memory, she thought
Yes, just a memory.