TEN

  by Cappy Love Hanson



Ten, and pipe-dreamed wings.  
Produced, instead, breast buds 
dripping not milk but blood.  
Anything worth having, my mother 
and her aunt intoned.  Hugged
my stuffed horse through dark,
through rhythmic bedsprings, 
through Mother’s animal moans, 
and thought the monthly hemorrhage 
still to come a halfwit’s consolation.