Susan Muth

Containment

The Flint Hills seem to shrink each year.
Last night I woke in a daze of switchgrass
brushing against window, to feel
my lover’s arms crush me against him. 

Isn’t that how girlhood feels—pressed down
on me with my mother’s hands, then by my lovers,
chanting in unison—stop growing.
Amidst languid days of a Midwest August 

when sweat collected under my breasts,
even just standing still in the shade
of a black walnut tree, I couldn’t stop my body
from showing me how it bleeds. I still 

thank her each time she weeps,
my lining, crafted in iron, this person
wrapped around me, the Flint hills
disappearing in a tallgrass prairie.

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Susan Muth is a Pushcart-nominated queer writer from Virginia. She is an MFA poetry candidate at George Mason University. Her poems have appeared or are forthcoming in The Pinch, West Trade Review, Breakwater Review, Chaotic Merge Magazine, Ucity Review, Rejection Letters, The Northern Virginia Review and others. She is the poetry editor for Phoebe and immediately looks up the IMDB page of any film she is watching.