Katya

Not of my own choosing
do my paps darken like muzzles.
My belly slowly swells.
I cannot see my valley now.
I crave for lassi
but they bring us rusty water
in the bottom of a can.

They come and come,
day, night, day,
unbuttoning
as the door slaps against the stucco.
They leave our thighs and faces
crusty with their stink.

And after me,
they hump across on to my mother,
covering her shrunken face
with her heavy dirndl skirt.
She is dry, dry.
Her womb is a husk.

Each day I am ripening.
I do not want this cuckoo
fluttering its rabid wings
in my darkness.
I can see its wild eyes beneath my skin.
It will suck me dry as rock.

Yet, I have practised its birth –
how I will keep my legs far apart,
my eyes screwed shut,
then roll it with my heel in the dust
kicking it and its afterbirth
down the mountainside.

Or, how I will say, Give me my baby,
and boy or girl, call it Katya.
That was my mother’s name.

*Pat Borthwick lives in rural East Yorkshire and has published three full-length collections. 'Katya' is from her latest, Admiral FitzRoy’s Barometer Templar 2008. She is a Hawthornden Fellow, a tutor for OCA and currently Writer in Residence for RSPB Bempton Cliffs.