A Series of Tales 

Your mother is calling for you
from the top of a pine—wind
threatening her fall. You were
an egg, a stomach ache,
and then she dropped you
in a green muck—hatched
you. Now go be a woman.

*

In a pit where she can’t
see the moon, the girl
paces a dirt floor, and the pit
feels—combed hair.
The girl never stops looking up.

*

Momma, she is calling you
from inside your body. You
taught her well how to catch
a kill and skin it. She only
has to wait for it.

*

You are on a bed
he made of other women’s
bodies. He will tell you not
to look, but you won’t be able
to shut your eyes. He’ll say:
when the girl is full grown,
you can have her, and she
will still be a girl.

*

Momma, she is still calling
you. She has followed the trail
of your teeth, but you’re
not there. She doesn’t
know what else to do.
She sits down and waits.

*

Momma tells you daddy
will never understand
your need to hold
the map. He’ll take
the breath out
of you, and wrestle
for your control.

*

In the belly of a bear,
she drank tea and ate
her own arm. She never
even tried to get out
just kept eating.

Erin Carlyle is published in journals such as Driftwood Press, and she has a chapbook with Dancing Girl Press. She is the Assistant Poetry editor at Mid-American Review and a MFA candidate at Bowling Green State University.