They say trauma takes two generations to leave the body
We survived ww1 with gut issues
Our becoming is becoming again
Our relative trauma
Is this why we did not have children?
Is this why we are revisiting pandemics?
Undoing a thousand tangled necklaces in jewellery boxes of ivory
My grandparents had to let toxins flow downstream whilst looking on and shouting: watch out!
Synapses firing, no longer guns, still uniforms they hang rotting in the barn like the carcasses we killed to earn a living until all the boys left us
We have a voice that becomes like an echo, the family tree of poetry, three generations that cry at a beautiful poem
Trauma multiplied by four or eight in women, the survivors of war who carried not their name forward but instead a shapeshifter chimera burning through time
How many full moon awakenings does it take for trauma to leave the body?
How many false starts in a peace that turned to war?
My head is buzzing from the shrapnel yet to be discovered when they pull me apart like pulled pork, blood pooling into the forgotten thoughts, which include thoughts of the forgotten
Canons and machine guns firing my synapses still
The drag queens know that women survived war too as they pull on the armour of heels and ardour
You try to heal it ten times or you don’t heal it at all. Failure comes quick on the way to success until the trauma leaves the body but it must leave the body and not get stuck on a rock or a beaver dam or a twist of fate caught in twigs and fallen leaves