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.