Abstract
I.
The only image I can offer
of the time of my swimming without armbands in
the sea of her love
is an oil slick thick
with asphyxia,
the matted weave of a world
to come in my gullet.
The only memory I can muster
of the lightless life before my birth
is the cry of girls,
crowing, gull-beaks breaking
in from the outside,
my welcome from the sisterhood.
Poppycock - my protest, my plea:
we are women, we are not womb.
II.
What is able to be said
in nine lines
drawn as three scores
at night
in the lama hair blanket
passed down by
my mother's
mother's
mother?
A heavy settlement
cloaked in her will,
a daughter's defiance
of always
the same bloody
clock hacking
the walls
in every
body's room.
This profligate womb.
This animal tic.
This irritant.
Footnotes
Author Biography
Julie Walsh is a lecturer in the Department of Psychosocial and Psychoanalytic Studies at the University of Essex. Her poem responds to a talk by Wendy Hollway entitled ‘Becoming a mother, gender and feminism’, which was presented on 21 October 2016 as the Annual Lecture of the Centre for the Study of Women and Gender (CSWG) at Warwick University. Composed after the event, ‘Becoming a mother: a response’ is part of a larger, ongoing project in which Walsh creates ‘academic verses’ to capture and process some of the different aspects of her working life.