Wooden mothers with faces
drawn in clots of crayon.
Surface convex, affect flat.
It’s something like a voice
carried by wind in a dead-end tunnel.
Each encase reproductions
entombed in hollow bodies,
stilted hearts just smaller than the next,
a gutted infinity mirror of images
indistinguishable except for size.
Shell casings all, besides the baby.
She’s the loaded bullet captured in the chamber,
the wine inside otherwise empty bottles,
the pearl that makes the oyster worth mining.
Carved from solid wood,
dense with wonder and infant smell,
she’s as yet internally undefiled by the carver’s scalpel.
She plays princess at interchangeable houses.
A few more years of imagining
that fire breathing dragons live in the den
and zebras with blue teeth in the living room
before she’s scraped clean
to harbor a statue of her own.
Solid for the blink of an eye,
then scooped out like a melon.
To break free each must crack
open her captor, only to remain empty
as a beggar’s pocket.
Mute pageant queens
in search of their pulpy guts
balanced precariously on a shelf.
Amy Strauss Friedman is the author of the chapbook Gathered Bones Are Known To Wander (Red Bird Chapbooks, 2016). Her poems have appeared or are forthcoming in The Rumpus, Pittsburgh Poetry Review, Kentucky Review, Red Paint Hill, FLAPPERHOUSE, and elsewhere. Her work can be found at amystraussfriedman.com.