Poetry Pause is the League of Canadian Poets’ daily poetry dispatch. Read “Millennial witch” by Antoinette Cheung.

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Millennial witch

By Antoinette Cheung

Do I wander the earth a hollow vessel

if I am not a mother?

If I had lived a few centuries before, perhaps

my body would already be ash,

burned at the stake for this heresy

of self-determination

my stubbornly empty womb a room

convulsing with the grumble of aunties over

“girls these days”. The older ones

click their tongues murmuring

something about my hips, too narrow

for childbearing.

that must be what’s wrong with her

In the Venn diagram between woman and

mother I float somewhere

off the page, a gash across the table

an act of vandalism

to our family tree obsessed with taxonomy

and neatly placing people into boxes.

But no matter how I contort myself

I don’t fit. I can’t fit

when Mother is as foreign an identity as if

I were to imagine myself a fish.

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Copyright © Antoinette Cheung

Antoinette Cheung is privileged to live on the occupied lands of the xʷməθkʷəy̓əm (Musqueam), Sḵwx̱wú7mesh (Squamish) and səl̓ílwətaʔɬ/Selilwitulh (Tsleil-Waututh) Nations, as an immigrant from Hong Kong. She is a poet of primarily haiku and related forms, whose work has been published in international haiku/senryu journals and anthologies. In 2024, she received first place in the Marlene Mountain Contest held by #FemkuMag. She is currently co-editor of the online senryu journal Prune Juice.

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