Before she was a mother
Before she was a mother
she was a moth
with markings on her back
strewn like the moss-glass
called moldovite
before fuzz and wings
she once stripped
every leaf from a weed one by one
her appetite forged
a rough crystalline structure
before the chrysalis
and the meteorite
before the green glass daughters
she was amorphous
a mass of silica
a massacre and a beauty 
before the illness
an hourglass
with all its threat intact
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Melissa Ginsburg
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POETRY
Photo by Jeffrey Surrianto on Pexels
Melissa Ginsburg is the author of the poetry collections Doll Apollo, forthcoming from LSU Press, and Dear Weather Ghost, published by Four Way Books, and 3 poetry chapbooks, as well as the novels The House Uptown and Sunset City. Her poems have appeared in the New Yorker, West Branch, Fence, Southwest Review, and other magazines. She is an associate professor of creative writing and literature at the University of Mississippi in Oxford, and serves as associate editor of Tupelo Quarterly.
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©2022 West Trade Review
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