Laura Cook explores the guidance and connection she feels with the wild women who live within her in her poem ‘Ancestral Aches’. For Issue #20 ‘Legacy’.

my body bears the legacy

of the women gone before.

stories,

most half-spoken

but ecstatically alive,

living,

memories.

ancestral aches,

reminding me

tread gently,

and with love.

a face my mind cannot place,

looks back at me

in the mirror

in before days,

before me.

once wild women,

detached yet intertwined,

in DNA spirals

turning within me.

a gut feeling,

a strange grief

not recognised as my own,

frantic inner echoes

trying to reach me,

through patched up puppetry.

reminding me,

a lifetime in the future,

this moment,

might not look like the past,

but the present.

Artwork by Ruby Bishop.