They told her she came out of a hole in her mother
but really it’s impossible to believe
something so delicate could come out of something
so fat—her mother naked
looks like a pig. She wants to think
the children telling her were making fun of her ignorance;
they think they can tell her anything
because she doesn’t come from the country, where people know these things.

She wants the subject to be finished, dead. It troubles her
to picture this space in her mother’s body,
releasing human beings now and again,
hiding them, then dropping them into the world,
but mostly just empty, like an empty room—

And worse is the idea that she was happy there,
that the way she feels about her bed
once she felt toward her mother; that this sense of solitude,
this calm, this sense of being unique—
that this was once connected to her mother, continuous with her—

Maybe her mother still has these feelings.
This could explain why she never sees
the great differences between the two of them

because if these facts are true
at one point they were the same person—

She sees her face in the mirror, the small nose
sunk in fat, and at the same time she hears
the children’s laughter as they tell her
it doesn’t start in the face, stupid, 
it starts in the body—

At night in bed, she pulls the quilt as high as possible,
up to her neck—