It is easy to claim her as dust

Shriveled away into matterless nothing

Her breasts swagging and hands shaking

her eyelids peeled white.

It is easy to call her a monster

lips like rotten china

cracked and torn into raw skin.

Underneath the feline flesh within her I saw breaking

blood seeping from her fingernails

Infants hung about her waste,

Where had all the babies gone

where had they gone?

They ruptured from her body

Cleaving through opening in her belly

dressed in the slimy black lace of death.

No more cradles, no more wrapping blankets for her.

She was shrouded in putrefaction

The smell wafting upwards from the mushroomed ground

With the stench of dead leaves 

and bleeding cotton trees begged by her vestiges of feet

from the earth beneath her there was weeping and crying,

Yet the infants she clung to weren’t breathing

and when she held them to her breast to feed

her body began to wither, weep, and waste.

No milk emerged from her swollen breast

only noxious fumes fell from her

like thick oily water, a deep blackish green

only seen from rancid fruit trees or 

molding bread. If you squeezed to tight, 

that is surely what would rupture from her skin.

Within her bones must’ve aged passed their strength

and usefulness, her ovaries shriveled.

Her bearing hips little more than a ragdoll now

No woman was she, but death undetering 

and more powerful than us all.

Still the infant's face remained blacked 

and as the old woman leaked her wiles

the wind blew, and after a while

the cotten-wood blew out the red, staining seeds

her ashen sinew wafted away and

the stench of death she haresses and rot,

decayed with her and her infant too. 

Leaving the world, more beautiful than ever