I am no longer so young as to avoid questions about the children I do not have and I wonder how anyone could believe that this body could sustain another, that it could provide enough to feed generations to come after me, that they would look to me and call me mother, that they would see me clothed in wonderment at my god-begotten duty There is not space beneath my ribs, under my skin to house, not room on my hip to hoist the blossoming of decades; my bones cannot bear the weight of furtherance and when I try to grow and gain, I find my prayers etched out in stretchmarks and in wrinkles and I ease in and out of the heavy clouds of powder and rouge, the smell of flour, dough caught in the cracks in my skin