- come. pray. know histories. today
is mother’s birthday. she insists on
dying. offer her a framed memory,
her maiden name clotted in a map older
than “america.” she will refuse, turn
away. grief sharpens the gales of wit.
again, she abandons.
- a twice born girl knows to rotate a tomb,
suspend mother’s crude gape, temper
a piston with cane syrup. terror is the knotty
clutch of an umbilical cord, an archive pulsing
with the carriage
of empires.
Copyright © 2025 by DaMaris B. Hill. Originally published in Poem-a-Day on July 1, 2025, by the Academy of American Poets.
