I want to tell you I love you in my mother’s tongue

and I want to tell you that the cautionary tales we grew up on are not quite the same
and I want to tell you that I come from a long line of women with wide feet and wide hips

and I want to tell you that I think a lot about the time babushka slapped my butt and told me I
wasn’t built to be delicate and beautiful like my sister

I was built to be sensual
to take pressure and give pleasure

to take the beating of the sun in fields of wheat that my mother’s mother’s mother would sow
barefoot

I come from wives and widows
who married drunks and sometimes the wives beat the husbands with broomsticks for coming
home drenched in piss

and sometimes the husbands would beat
the wives with open fists

so I was built to give and take a beating
it runs in my bloodline that can be traced for hundreds of years to dense pine forests

and every time it rains I have the overwhelming urge to run outside barefoot and feel the mud
between my toes

and ask the women who came before me if they ever had any happy endings