The Unknown Mother

Melanie Alberts

March 23, 2022

She is carried from the bombed-out maternity ward on a watermelon colored blanket her hip dislocated and her pelvis broken her belly slit open she knows her infant is lost she cries out kill me now the doctors must deliver her body unborn baby to her family where why how will they bury her broken in two?

unwinnable

the black seeds we spit

at each other

Writer and psychic artist Melanie Alberts works at the University of Texas at Austin. Her work has appeared/is forthcoming in Prune Juice Journal, Sleet Magazine, Failed Haiku, Drifting Sands, Texas Poetry Assignment, Ransom Center Magazine, Borderlands, bottle rockets, and others. Follow M. on Instagram @clair.circles.spirit.art