Kait Mauro

Blood Paintings Series

I.

Still I've said: motherhood is not for me.

And my own mother has cringed, thinking

of how she has tied her whole life

around that role. She is imagining

grandchildren and I am imagining forests.

I have seen the housecat, mewing,

gnawing kittens hang from her breasts —

clinging and needing. Trapped,

I have seen her disgust.

II.

I still do not understand why our bodies

count the same rhythms as the moons

but I have learned to think of these,

the blood paintings on the pales

of my thighs, as a map

of where my body has been.

And when finally my body opened,

after years of not knowing

if it would know how to take it,

the blood ran freely down

to pool neatly near the knees.

The whole place reeked of red,

reeked of my trauma. It ran in rivers

along the floorboards of our apartment,

leading from room to room.

III.

The wind doesn't howl, it moans

like a body satisfied. And all winter

this house has been ready to burst

with the obscene sound of it.

We look away.

We know only the terse civility

of our brief exchanges, coming or

going through the slick metal shame

of the front door. Every morning the same

arguments: sex, the lack of it, the weather

in the adjoining rooms. Our accusations

linger in the kitchen, cling to the damp

towels and watch us, a rankled cat,

as we burn logs to heat the home.

CP

Kait Mauro was born in Pittsburgh and currently lives in Saint Louis. She spends her days making art, watering her apartment garden, reading obsessively and trying to figure out what comes next and how to like it.