for the barren women

This is good practice for when you have kids, they say.
I'm not going to have children, I say.
You would be a great mother, they say,
as if they know
my childhood,
my young adult trauma,
my mental illness,
me.

Your only purpose is to be a mother,
echoes a voice from my past.
Somewhere between then and now I had forgotten
the only thing that makes a woman worthwhile:
her ability to have children.

I think of Michal, a childless woman.

Long before any spark of my existence was lit,

she spoke too honestly, and was punished
in the worst way her god could conceive of.

I like to imagine she was grateful to her god
that she would never be forced to have a child.