True Metal

a golden bracelet, the one from your mother, you mean to pass onto your daughter, not the oldest one because she is the story of travel, but the next one who holds your skirt when you sit on the couch reading the news in English

flowers ribbon a single braid
you comb her hair with your fingers, lace in silk threads,
tatreez, alphabet home

prayer
prayer
prayer
good night my darlings

sky fall

            caved breastplate
            curled spine
            thunder
            against
prayer
prayer
prayer
                  knees crack
                  wrists bound
                  slit up the middle
They will show the pictures of you collapsing onto the stones, they will show you
ground into stone, they will shovel you under the world, they will go after more.

And you molten.

Credit

About this Poem

“A mother might imagine [her daughters’ inheritance as] something silky like a ribbon or resilient like a gold bracelet. She might tell stories to inspire wanderings or for passing on. Later, the daughter might remember her mother when she sees her eyes in her own face, or when her hair gets caught in the gold chain [that holds] the khamsa lying in the valley of her clavicle. This is before the mother must become armor, deflecting the falling sky. ‘True Metal’ does not let them become rubble in the destruction. Instead, they are the unmined metals driven into the earth.”
—Elmaz Abinader

Author

Elmaz Abinader

Elmaz Abinader is an Arab American poet and the author of This House, My Bones (Willow Books/Aquarius Press, 2014). She is the recipient of the PEN Oakland/Josephine Miles Literary Award. A literary activist, Abinader lives in Vallejo, California, on the unceded land of Patwin, Ohlone, and Pomo Tribes.

Date Published

12/24/2025