A ten-thousand-year-old birth canal
in the middle of the earth
custom-fits coffins around our bodies.
How many girls have been buried alive
because someone didn’t tie
bells to their ankles?
The hand my aunt means
for comfort is a stalagmite
in my shoulder. Gradually,
she will grow through me
into the stone and together
will become part of the walls.
Soon, we’ll be forgotten.
And there are so many places
I haven’t been.
Outside the exit, girls splash each other
in the pool of Shiloh; tourists
leave and move on with their day.
Don’t you understand
what it means to be alive? I’m alive
today—alive and full of light.
–
Meg Eden Kuyatt is the author of the 2021 Towson Prize for Literature winning poetry collection Drowning in the Floating World and the forthcoming obsolete hill (Fernwood Press, 2026) and children’s novels including the Schneider Family Book Award Honor-winning Good Different, The Girl in the Walls, and Perfect Enough, all with Scholastic. When she isn’t writing, she teaches creative writing students.