NESTING DOLL

Every girl is a nesting doll,
daughters stacked within daughters.
I was my mother’s daughter before
she was a mother, my daughter’s mother before
she was a daughter.

I move with my mother’s body, her the bones
my flesh cushions. Every step I take
she has taken before. Each the shadow of the other,
daughter dutifully following mother, mother devotedly
following daughter.

I cry with my daughter’s voice
and she laughs with mine. She translates
the language of my tongue,
the language I cannot decipher. We speak for each other
I, the echo of her, her of me.

We share each other.
Mother’s, their food, their body, their dreams.
Daughter’s, their successes, their failures, their suffering.
We are braided into each other,
a tangle into which one ends so the other can begin.

We emerge from each other to live,
we die to return to each other.
My mother goes to sleep in my womb
as I once slept in her. She hollows
as I swell.

I have been a mother
as long as I’ve been a daughter,
my mother a daughter for just as long.
We are bodies cut from the same timber, heads
cradled by each other’s bellies, each
a doll carved for the other.