Interrogation Suite: Where did you come from / how did you arrive?

I ripped my mother being born

             and I am the only.

                            The oldest ripped my grandmother

                                     and still came more.

We have a family history

             of losing our heads,

                            of no one listening,

                                        of telling someone before.

We are raucous and willful,

              loud as thunder.

                            No one can forget us,

                                        we bear our teeth.

We pass through bodies

              like summer heat. We eat

                            and thicken, worry men.

                                        They plead and suffer, come again.

I entered the world

              a turning storm,

                            but no one stopped me

                                        though they’d been warned.

Copyright © 2019 by Remica Bingham-Risher. Originally published in Poem-a-Day on June 12, 2019, by the Academy of American Poets.