Mom is a sticking door — Olivia Walters

Gentle violence opens this body; 
your knuckles, swollen purple with the weight of your womb
find the hinging door.
Work at it wordlessly— 
silver shell skidding, slits the skin of joints, 
leaving one of you open, the other prudently closed.

Joints and openings; 
those opening-hinges
that have always stuck for you 
since my body first took your bones 
as mine.

Those insideless bones—
marrow sucked away,
a fish-bone skeleton
inside a human woman
who says she'll never
shuck oysters again.

Your hand leaks
a watery ribbon of blood 
into the shell's piqued hood, 
its nacre pink and glistening.
And your hands – open everything: 
your body, twice, prying me out.

Pry the pearl from that body 
and leave me that
shiny womanhood – 
that sticking door.

Shell to my mouth– 
soft blood sacrifice –
tenderness tastes like
your insides.
Mom,
I love to eat what you've opened –
to be what opens 
you. 

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Olivia Walters is a sophomore at Bow High School in New Hampshire. Her poetry has received a Scholastic Art & Writing Silver Key for the state of New Hampshire and she was a finalist for the American Library of Poetry Student Contest.