The Fertile Source

by Leslie Contreras Schwartz

My right boot ruptures like a heart valve tearing,
tenderly and exact-a zipper splits while I think

of the being inside, housed in a pyramid
in the hushed, broad portion of myself that waits.

Sting hums in the abdomen, an invading horde
of hungry bees swelling to a foreign hive. Holding in

what must look like a just-discovered ruby,
stained with the soil of the body, rust-raw,

it climbs from the rooms of some god’s foggy breath,
as if to rise after the heat of a boiling rain that falls like a salve.

Yet who says I am ready to be someone’s mother?
What room of myself-O lord of seed and sinew-

will muscle, bone, blooming, find a place to reside?
What-part of me bubbles over, to disappear in the thirsty earth.

Leslie Contreras Schwartz is an MFA Poetry student in the Warren Wilson College program. She lives in Houston, Texas.