Ancestor Syndrome
A Fulani believes herself inevitably a bird fullburn.
She will say she soon ascends, mistress over milks.
As to the superpower: Her second stomach a steel.
What? My bloodkind take active pride in tolerance—
of lactose—inheriting the Lactase Persistence Trait,
making-to-order Universe from 1 molecular milk.
Our insults involve enzyme—cowmilk curdles them
that lack. We digest dairies, we cattle herd, we bird.
I ask and it is explained to me: what milk has to do
with mass murder. I bathed in a bathtub full of full-
fat milk and never felt more a monster. The second
time you read the Bible through, it makes less sense
than the first, but still—try mingling milk & honey.
I deserve none of the good rife things got in this life.
To offer fresh cream on Saharan shrines is madness,
so we won’t do it. I fancy metaphors about Moon
and more. I do not remotely adore milk metaphor.
A light body alit in lait—life in lanterna ’til Aljanna:
In sha Allah celestia ever antiseptic/unsour. AMIN.
Copyright © 2026 by Mary-Alice Daniel. Originally published in Poem-a-Day on February 25, 2026, by the Academy of American Poets.
“My second book-in-progress opens inside the former Fulani Caliphate, the pre-colonial Islamic theocracy established by my ancestors at the base of the Sahel. The heiress to an empire of orthodoxy, also of slavery, I address culpability, songbirds, syncretism, and ancestral curse: restless vestiges of the Trans-Saharan slave trade—the wages of kin. We Fulani are [cowherds], inheriting a trait rare in West Africa: Our bodies produce the lactase enzyme. We drink dairy; raw milk cannot worry our stomachs. I experiment with my literary tradition—once the site of Sufi virtuosity; revivals in rhapsody; ecstatic lyric. All my poems are self-indictment.”
—Mary-Alice Daniel
Mary-Alice Daniel
Mary-Alice Daniel received her BA in English from Yale University, her MFA in creative writing from the University of Michigan–Ann Arbor, and her PhD in English literature and creative writing from the University of Southern California.
She is a Fulani American poet and author of Mass for Shut-Ins (Yale University Press, 2023), winner of the 2022 Yale Series of Younger Poets, as well as A Coastline Is an Immeasurable Thing: A Memoir Across Three Continents (Ecco Press, 2022).