After Michael Armitage’s, Wait 

I.

My son will worry
for years that he too
may suffer from another
lifetime, worry that he
will be a man like other men
named family.

II.

When my son loves
a man, he believes
that man to be a good man,
forgives easily,
is the kindest person
I know, because he loves
cannot easily anticipate  
the serpents
that rise from mouths
which can be pre-historic places.

III.

His father accuses—
How I’ve made his son gay.

I revel in my super powers.

IV.

Pack animal etiquette
can be brutal &
at other times benevolent.

Vulnerable species huddle
for warmth
in strange places.
Some packs eat their young,
turn a queer child on to the streets.
Sometimes the Omega
becomes the Alpha,
sometimes they leave
well enough alone.

V.

I have devised a warning system
for my son. Some of us
are like wounds, I tell him
some of us rise. 

MK Chavez is the author of Mothermorphosis and Dear Animal, (Nomadic Press.) Chavez was a recipient of a 2017 Pen Oakland Josephine Miles Award for poetry, and in the same year, her poem The New White House, Finding Myself Among the Ruins was selected by Eileen Myles for the Cosmonauts Avenue Poetry Prize. In 2018 Alley Cats Books published her lyric essay, A Brief History of the Selfie as a chapbook. Chavez has received fellowships from Hedgebrook, CantoMundo, North Street Collective Resident Program, and VONA among others; she is co-founder/curator of the reading series Lyrics & Dirges and co-director of the Berkeley Poetry Festival. Her most recent publications can be found in bags of coffee from Nomad Coffee and on Academy of American Poets, Poem-A-Day as a featured poem for December 2018.

Raising Mothers is a free online literary magazine for femmes and NBPOC parents of color. We center the work of the marginalized in our effort to normalize our stories and existence on the web, and in life.