Ode to Mother
I have hunted for Mother
Howled at Mother Moon
Pricked my healing with Mother Cactus
Touched my pleasure parts, the Mother Wound
Traced snowprints of Mother Doe
Prayed to Holy Mother Mary Magdalene and anointed myself in her sins
Hung low with sadness with Mother Weeping Willow
I want to be with you, Mother.
I have built my own protection
out of apple blossoms that clothe me in nectar.
My heart is a cellar of stories
In my Mother’s tongue.
I stretch my body to
your motherland to taste your honey.
( There is a version of harmony.
Where Mother Memory is not needed
Because she never left. )
I prepare a table in the presence of the ones who separate children from their Mothers,
The steak knife cuts me from the Mother Meat.
Tomorrow is wedding day
& Mother marries me.
Here you are, Mother.
crowning me with your goodness &
gathering my tears
A righteous moisture, Mother says
For my daughter’s braids.
You section my hair into three strands & we start to sing
Nobody knows the trouble I’ve seen, glory hallelujah
I pierce your palms with my fangs
& devour your flesh
I want to keep all of you,
all of me, Mother.
Ecosystem of Desire
I am at the massage therapist again
She is a white lady who practices, Ashiatsu
The kind of massage where someone is walking on your back
It is not the first time a white woman has walked on my back.
I am here because my legs hurt all of the time
It has been this way since last year when I got pregnant
And I had a sedentary desk job and it was a pandemic so I did not get
out much.
I never know when my leg pain will flare up
It could be when I pick up my daughter with her perfect crown of curls
It could be when I open the vegetable drawer at the bottom of the refrigerator,
here are some green onions and red bell peppers that are starting to mold.
It could be when I open my mailbox and see a letter addressed to me from
The State of Pennsylvania, Department of Vital Records.
Inside the envelope is my birth certificate.
At thirty-three, in the layers of postpartum,
existing inside of pain and joy,
I am seeing the whole thing for the first time.
My first name,
Jessica June,
gone too soon.
My first incision, a place
That has never healed.
My mother’s name is there.
My mother.
Her name is Glenda, she is my good witch, no matter what the adoption agency says.
They strip infants away from their mothers; they have no say in what goodness is.
Today my baby is the same age
I would have been at relinquishment
How is this fracture allowed?
This breaking of mother from daughter, daughter from mother
There is a shrill call in my body
It knows and unknows the beginning
Seeing my birth certificate brings
a round of knocking questions
a woodpecker piercing the source of pain
I steep in what could have been,
My mother, my beacon of light
And me always cocooned in her arms
It feels like the cattail wetlands
Tucked around my childhood home
Where the Great Blue Heron took to the sky
Her giant wings; two brush strokes across the fire
and marigold summer sunset
and then the absolute darkness that I have always known.
The tree hollow where my questions for my mother
go to rest in their own ecosystem of desire
in the empty nests of birds,
family memory is
interwoven & everlasting.
I release the pain from my inner heartwood of decay
So that the only sound I hear
As the massage therapist walks on my back
is the name my mother sang
to put me asleep.
