Breast-giver

Beggar-pickpocket-hooker,
breast-giver—she creates in the
blind alleys with chapped feet and
large round breasts. Take your wife,
greedy crow, unthinking bull driven by
lust. You eat rice and stolen samosas by
the oil lamp. Countless beings raised a hue
and cry in deepest night. She creates as mother,
pinched skinny even while your flies were
fat. Her capacious bosom, a seething vat
of milk. Her offspring, a better human
material created by devotion, by
mother’s will. I put flowers on
her belly, her languid-hipped
body, her motherhood.

–found in “Breast-giver” by Mahasveta Devi. Trans. Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak. Breast Stories. Pgs. 38-45. Print.

• Originally published in Degenerates: Voices for Peace. Weasel Press. November 2014.

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Trish Hopkinson has always loved words—in fact, her mother tells everyone she was born with a pen in her hand. She has two chapbooks Emissions and Pieced Into Treetops and has been published in several anthologies and journals, including The Found Poetry Review, Chagrin River Review, and Reconnaissance Magazine. Trish is co-founder of a local poetry group, Rock Canyon Poets. She is a project manager by profession and resides in Utah with her handsome husband and their two outstanding children. You can follow her poetry adventures at http://trishhopkinson.com/ or on her Facebook page: https://www.facebook.com/trishhopkinsonpoet.

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