I enter then this motherhood on my knees & hide the clove inside of one name, the secret head inside of one. Other things I cannot know. Like what it was to carry the purple root. Such is loss. An egg, a jar of smoke. We stood in line. When it was our time there was no long road leading us to each other. This is my poem, my luck. These are my hands. This one of my cups is empty but for your names next to the clouds inside the orange trees. I have seen them, mothers of mothers of mothers at the train stations & in the park smoothing flat their broad sheets across the grass. I lift the baby to my hip and take my son’s hand. One mother cannot be enough. I have one mother now you know. But once there were more & they were for me once as I am for my children. It is true I am a rhyme, but a rhyme looking back though my two pull from me & I am frictive with time, haggard with milk— & each breast, it hisses with future.
Aracelis Girmay is the author of three books of poems: the black maria, Teeth, and Kingdom Animalia. She is also the author/illustrator of the collage-based picture book changing, changing. For her work, Girmay was nominated for a Neustadt International Prize for Literature in 2018. She is the 2019-2020 Writer-In-Residence at Pratt and is on the editorial board of the African Poetry Book Fund.
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