Stone Baby by Issa M. Lewis

You grew out voluptuous and inappropriate,
conjured from blood and breath
and landed on a strange shore.
And when you had filled your vessel,
licked every drop of sustenance from the walls,
you curled, let your blood grow sluggish and dark
and sighed yourself into a granite sleep.
Layer after layer settled and smoothed
your features clean.  On the outside,
your mother’s hand curved over roundness
that no longer had place, as if she could
polish your skin into golden pearl.

Issa M. Lewis is the author of Infinite Collisions (Finishing Line Press, 2017) and Anchor (Kelsay Books, 2022).  She received the 2013 Lucille Clifton Poetry Prize.  Her poems have previously appeared in Rust + Moth, North American Review, and South Carolina Review, amongst others.  Her website is www.issalewis.com.

The Coop: A Poetry Cooperative’s Editor, Laura Lee Washburn, has selected July’s poems around the site’s current theme “We’re Speaking” to capture voices pushing back against the current attacks in the U.S. on human rights and on democracy. Citizens of Kansas have an attack on their state constitution on the ballot August 2nd on which we hope they will vote no in order to preserve the Kansas legacy of being a free state in which all citizens have bodily autonomy. We stand in solidarity with all people affected by current rulings from the radicalized Supreme Court.

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