The Prophet’s Birth

I keep my mother inside my body, housed
in a tin can carved from a large metal seashell
that washed up at my feet,

she rattles
shaking her head to Tina Turner lyrics, rock ‘n roll
echoing off the walls.

When I speak, she hears me
muffled but voluminous,
like Jonah listening inside the whale.

The absence of her body
seems like something made over thousands of years,
compounded by something stronger and smaller

than a body, its folded layers polished opalescent by
something like a tongue for a mouth to sing,
a pearl hollowed inside its own house with no way out

but still compelled to keep the beat.

Death is the hollowed-out version of birth. In the story
of the prophet’s return to earth, a vast, empty vessel
was said to contain one tiny stone, shaped by the sea,

a stone the size and shape of a pea.

Dorothy Neagle is a Kentuckian who lives and writes in New York. She has studied writing most recently at the Unterberg Poetry Center, and her poetry has appeared or is forthcoming in Pioneertown, Tiny Spoon, The Fieldstone Review, and more. Her nonfiction has appeared in Memoirist, The Nasiona, and the Dead Mule School of Southern Literature. You can find her on instagram @sentencesaremyfave.