Elsasoa Jousse Shares "Mother" from Poetry Series "When Mom Is Gone"
Illustration by Reilly Webster
“Mother” is the second poem from the collection When Mom Is Gone by Montreal-based multimedia artist Elsasoa Jousse. In the author’s words, the series focuses on themes of “craving, losing, and then finding motherhood.” Read the piece “Mother,” and keep an eye out for her following works to be released as a short series in the coming weeks.
Illustration by Reilly Webster
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Mother
She should have been her home,
Her shoulder to cry on
When, in time, she would realise the horrors of this world,
But her initiation came earlier
And by the end of it, no shoulder was left for either of them.
It wasn't simply murder,
It was visceral, cold-blooded slaughter.
To kill this senseless, innocent creature,
A child, with no sense of good and bad,
But so young exposed to such extremities...
She could not stay pure so long,
Bathing in her suffering,
Her mother's gift,
A gift for them both.
As God pleasured herself in her twisted humour,
A pleasant shriek sprung from her belly.
Oh, what thrill in that shrill voice!
The joy of creation balanced by its destruction.
They had no power, no power at all to endure this life,
But it is now her duty
To bear the memory
Of her own atrocity.
Elsasoa Jousse is a multimedia artist from France and Madagascar based in Montreal, Canada. Her main interests are poetry, spoken word, music production, and DJing under the name NGL Flounce. Her narrative and lyrical poems form nuanced sketches of self-reflection, loss, sexuality, culture, cycles of life and earth, and the critique of Eco-Fascism.
