Saying yes to no and yes to yes to the baby boy so many times a day it’s like a people’s protest chant gone non- electric harboring a claim belonged to everyone who cares, we care, we crawl outside and spy more life to point and yes at with a name. What do you call the fence around a tree? Who is the life you seek when indexing the noon moon’s matte navel, gray and nervous, and tell her wait for night? To mother is a power ever to be repeating, peat-cut to provide a weight of burnable goods by eons replaced, a turf, a moniker, another yes.

From The Decadent Movement by Laura Kolbe. Copyright © 2026. Available from University of Pittsburgh Press.