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Summer 2020 Archive

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Poetry

When First I Heard My Mother Scream
By Jamal Michel

           “They used to take pregnant women and dig a hole in the ground and jut their stomachs in it and whip them. They tried to do my
           grandma that way.” 
           ​-Arkansan Marie Hervey, who lived on the Hess plantation in Tennessee.

If Autumn a howling, sucking wind
then it was around that time 

There, a scent calling the flies
to Southern fruit 

Fertile soil, caked to my mother’s belly,
a divot made in my image

Hands from the field, the stuff of crust
at the bottom of their pots

Blood curdling from my mother’s 
gullet, stuck to my basal skin, my blood

She named me Death,
called out to me by name, I know it 

How the earth rocked, how it cradled
and soothed

My father sediment, held me close
and covered my ears

My mother sank her teeth into him,
swallowed root and root and blood

The sun, a crescent a boiling 
and cells make my eyes hurt

Turn my eyes slits, make holes
this divot, wholly her own 

​
Penumbra @ Stan State
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  • Home
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