& all I can think about is how one player
cracked his teeth & I can hear my mom crying
your beautiful body! like she did each time
I pierced a flap or tattooed a surface or
so much as scraped a joint & I'm not a mother,
not in the ossified sense, & I don't intend to bear
children even though a friend of mine declared
parenthood the most punk act of hope fathomable
& I'm not a mother but I am my mother
& my mother was punk because she brought me
into the jewelry shop time & time & time again
when my beautiful body refused the wounds I opened
& all I really want is for our children to skate through
this game of skill and ice, medal in hand, skull intact.
Annelise Schoups is a Chicana Belgian-American poet, essayist, and critic who laughs at her own jokes and writes about things that are mostly not funny. Her work appears in HAD, Silly Goose Press, Another Chicago Magazine, Only Poems and elsewhere. You can find her in San Diego, where she plans thru-hikes with her partner, or on Instagram, where it's less weird to follow her, @anneliseschoups.