“mother” mismatched; error

i.

as defined by a clasping of easter eggshells / as defined in the future tense: he is already father, while you must wait until a child escapes from within you to be mother / i.e. “you will make such a great mother” / i.e. the father is granted a badge for impregnation / before your child slips from bloodsport //

ii.

mother does not return you to a womb / where does the womb go when it sleeps beneath the stomach? / does it hunger for child? / does its function disembody the mother? / under the canopy of years / a jack pine waits for its conifers to burn / before believing in children / butternut squash is hollow around the dome of its seed-clusters / when you say mother / a filching of time retches in my useless stomach / when you say mother / i eat a day’s weight of buffet / to surrogate my spine upright with my unwomanhood / when i say mother / i don’t think you’re supposed to hear a boy speaking / i do not want to hear a boy speaking / i want to hear me speaking //

iii.

once, my father challenged me to be a conch king / find the first unbroken conch shell along the beach, adorn a title on my brow / he was hard of belief when / i found a crown of horns settled by the deformed clog of a mollusk / its tanned gloss of flesh breathed as one / i later learned the shells were better known as queen conchs / but we were there to take homes, broken or not / my father held me on his shoulders / he tossed the shankha, a cracked cradle only a wind chime could love / back into gray ocean froth //

Liam Strong is a transgender-non-binary writer and the former editor-in-chief of NMC Magazine. Currently, they’re working on their Bachelor’s in English at the University of Wisconsin-Superior while working as an English tutor, as well as a staff writer for White Pine Press and The Promethean, where they write music reviews and the occasional news. You can also find their work in Impossible Archetype, Painted Cave, Dunes Review, Monday Night, IDK Magazine, 3288 Review, The Maynard, Peach Mag, Blue River Review, and Panoply. They have been nominated for the Pushcart Prize in 2019. They live in Traverse City, Michigan.