at night we make ourselves crawl to a grove of oak trees 
and coax them into revealing the color of their aches. 
someone I once loved said that blood 
is the final liquid, and once I had begun 
to love them a little less I learned that all the fluid 
in our bodies has been inside at least four other animals’ 
bodies before ours. we start gathering what we need 
before we need it, before the clinics close and get further 
or impossibly away. the people I love put their hands 
on each other’s backs and trade backstock of shelf-stable 
prescriptions. don’t you, too, want someone to touch you, 
gently?

today I’m on the phones and a mother calls. her daughter 
is on the toilet, part of it passed and the other still hanging 
from her body. every egg is a descendant’s descendant
and an ancestor’s ancestor and when I wanted to bleed
the midwives told me that every spirit comes in knowing 
for what and how long. where this mother and this daughter live, 
there is only one emergency room who will take care of her 
without asking how the bleeding came to be. one word 
for knowing how to belong to one’s own body is coven. 
I’m telling you, we’ve always taken care of one another, 
and you are never to pull on the hanging tissue, 
and you are always to look into your mother’s eyes 
who blesses your ache with her own. 

someone I once loved finds their cervix in the mirror 
as we open it. we are as gentle as we can be 
while we unroot and reseed, not willing
to confuse tenderness for surrender. the phone rings again; 
she says the rest has come through, and that her daughter 
is soft now. at night, we coax the body to release what we can
and cannot see. once we have begun to love each other more,
we return to the trees to offer liquid to belonging. 
and then we sit by, quietly breathing each other’s breathing, 
as our descendants’ ancestors and our ancestors’ descendants 
and mugwort is named after Artemis, who belonged 
to no one but herself and I’m telling you that blood, as it returns 
to other animals is the same color as our oak. don’t you, too, 
want someone to touch you?