LOVEDAY WHY

 

Cord

 

The women on Instagram have tattooed arms and are eating their own placentas.
I send mine off to a clinic       Strange to pack an organ
in bubble wrap            one
grown specifically for purpose and that you
pulled behind you like a home on a rope        across countries to more habitable terrain.

What came back was a small pot of foul-smelling dark capsules
‘Do not re-ingest your organ on an empty stomach’—
and your umbilical cord that someone had spontaneously
looped into the word LOVE before placing in the dehydrator.
This we still have

to possibly plant as part whēnua         one day           almost a burial
of your womb home in your new home as it seems we are still
not quite part of this land.

Perhaps with closeness to the river it will rehydrate
perhaps blood will loosen back into the earth’s veins
from this resilient shrunken cord. Perhaps it will pulse like a heart again.

 

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Loveday Why is a PhD candidate in avant-garde poetics and ecopoetics at the University of Otago. She has had work published in magazines and online magazines in New Zealand, Australia and the UK. This poem has been taken from a group she has written to unravel ancestral patterns in her marriage that have bled through from her grandparents, Another poem in this sequence was shortlisted for the Bridport prize, which was exciting.