Mother Poet

After a reading, baby strapped to me
poems prick beneath my skin. 
A local professor asks,
How does it feel to be a mother poet?
 
I blink. Balk.
If she asked today I would say:
Mother fucking great.
 
I know joy like ten toes
pain like peeled nipples
terror like a child dead inside me
the minus you, the plus infinity things
and the cycles of time askew.
 
I’m tired and angry and 
raw, full of lethal love. 
I could rip you apart
with a child on my chest
eat you like a lioness 
lick blood from my claws.
 
Mother poet, they say it 
as an insult, as if mothering
and poems are not sacred,
as if mothering and poems
cannot save us all.