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Sarah Brown

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Domesticity

The glamour’s off - my feet no longer burn
To tread the circling earth beneath them - let it turn
I’ll never make the North Pole now -
I’ve been domesticated, tethered, like a cow.

And so, by virtue of my bursting udder
And though I’ve seen Siberia and Cape Comorin;
Though I’ve resisted being made a mother,
A voice in my head cries ‘cush pet’ and I, relieved, come
                                                                    running in.

Here I stand, then, prosaic, chastened, tamed,
Pressing my face for comfort into the fug of fellow beasts.
Here, thankfully, all difference is policed,

And lurks no possibility of fame;
Yet on our smooth, homogenous, bovine hides
I find drawn, in black and white, map after map of
                                              continents, of worlds, untried,
Unvisited, because romance died.

A cowed, lumbering refugee,
I stumble towards the barnyard of my fecundity.

 

Page(s) 32-33

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