“Wombling” by C.M. Soto was published in the 1996 issue of the Meadville, Pennsylvania, Allegheny Review. “Wombling” was reprinted in Soto’s anthology, These are the Rooms to my Mother’s House.

Wombling

This hollow case cries out,
yodeling against the trap door.
These days, she is vacant,
yawning like a mouth,
gnashing her gums for a seed.
She claws for me to feed her
as she rings her glory bell.

She craves the shudder of a child,
the stretch of buttocks
against her V-shaped walls.
She aches to be bloated, serene
and satiated for a time. She is rude.
Open-mouthed, she chews.

She grips me with her pulpy fists
and hammers her children down.
Agony, I await the day when she dies,
pulled gasping from the flood
through that raw red opening.

In which, I, the veteran,
lay flowers at her cunt.
From her epitaph,
read her open like a poem:
This is how she wiped her mouth:
front to back, back to front.