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Materfamilias & Milk, poems published by Diane Raptosh
Mothers among African black eagles hoard rock hyrax carcasses—jackrabbit-sized mammals hiding in kopjes—yet feed just one of two eaglets. Moms stand by looking bored as A-chick jabs its sib to bits. Great egret babes fight to the death in murmuring darkness; motherbird yawns. So too with pelicans, cranes, and blue-footed boobies. Fatal battles brim in hyena and fox dens, in roadside ditches seething with cannibal tadpoles. Mother hawks and owls halve their broods and eat them too. As for the mother panda, did she not give birth to twins? Magellanic penguin moms lay two eggs and let one starve. Deep in the forest a black stork that’s fed her nest a bolus of chewed fish grabs the smallest heir by the head and chucks it over the nest-rim. Fatal eviction. Rhesus monkey moms kick, bite, thump, and gash their tots as part of a regular diet. Coots repeatedly roughhouse offspring to death. Mother squids lay eggs on ocean floors and scram. Ocean sunfish moms flee three hundred million fecundated eggs in one-shot spawns. Some rodent mums consume their sickly kids to spare the rest. Mothers among lions, monkeys, and mice ditch newborns when a new male swashes into view, transgressing their way into safety. Pregnant female mice exposed to new males are likely to abort their young. Same with wild mustang moms—a phenom called the Bruce effect. That guinea hen walks so fast her brood can’t possibly keep up. A famished lactating chimp will slay and gulp a groupmate’s kid grief-free: a swift meal. A mouthfeel. A lean mound of lipids. The mother nurse shark boasts two uteri but lacks placentae. She feeds her inner fish on skins and fins of fellows in the womb. Among ants of a rare genus, tired queens will, of an evening, kick up their feet, chew holes in their larvae, and chug their issue’s ooze. Take this, each of you, and sip, and feast.
Milk
It is right to give her thanks and praise: this species of wingless female cockroach of the tropical genus Perisphaerus Semilunatus. Fair and unerring to glorify: For under the partial moon, beneath her black carapace, she carefully feeds her famished blind nymphs mother’s milk. Belaud this leaf-flat, ovoid body wrung from the family Blattidae: For daily, for some time, the roachlings will cleave to her underside, sniff with their mouths, and press their tubular palps to her breasts. Drink this bread, she’d advise were she able. Praise and ennoble. For she looks like the giant pill millipede. For she is lowly, for the most part. For she is a form of lord. For affinity is the highest number in the world.
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