Khadijah Queen

A SON BORN TO A FAMILY OF WOMEN

Swollen with you, teased
into terror by predictions,
my high-sitting belly shifts. 
"You ain't ugly enough,"
they tell me. "Girls steal
their mothers' looks."
And I shone like pressed copper,
rich with you.  My skin
was never again so perfectly smooth.
When you came, screaming out of me
as I screamed in getting you
out, the same piercing pitch
raging from our lips, I wondered
had my tense heart left
all its knowledge of blood
to you, my red sacrifice.

Date of Birth:	June 13, 1975
Location:	Virginia Beach, Virginia
Occupation:	Mother, Student, Soon-to-be military vet
Email:	khadjiq@netscape.net
Publications:	Eye Dialect, The Pedestal Magazine, Pierian Springs, three candles, Niedergnasse, Third Muse, Artemis Journal, Poet's Canvas, The Adirondack Review, sidereality, etc.

- October 2002 - Conjugating Anatomies After the Flood Instruction Hey You Kids, Get That Dirty Bomb Off My Lawn! Oven-sun Bus Stop breasts Bread and Tulips A Son Born To A Family of Women variation on pollock's cathedral Leonardo’s Notebooks - Poetry by Current & Former Editors - Charming Jenna Sept. 10th the things we do for Kings must end sometime Song Leftovers I'm learning to love haiku Valet Parking at the Salvation Army Shark in Sheep’s Clothing - Stirring's Best From Year Three - Killing Cattle for Disease, Greeley, 1998 Dear Anna Body Parts for Art Hogs Loosed En Route to Slaughter Trying to Raise the Dead Groundhog Day