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.