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Summer 2020 Archive

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Poetry


cradle. 
By Nailah Mathews

my grandmother lived in a lagoon of silt 
between the nine middle west winds, somewhere 
around zephyr four-point-five-nine. 
this was a woman who ate stone plums for pleasure 
who made mosaics from bones and vomit, who had 
enough hands to shove all her husbands down the stairs 
at once. 

my mother was born east of magic, 
spoke only in verbs until she became a woman 
and when that moon came, the sky opened up. 
she received one nut for each wish the world made 
she baked pies with them, made the 
houseblockneighborhood smell like 
hope for the future. 

i was born south of no-man’s land, 
no more than handful and a half of miles from isiscyra 
my mother touched a screw on the railroad tracks 
forty-five days before she got fat in the belly and 
it still did not protect her from me. 

her granddaughter is a keloid scar on my retina. 
she walks in phalanx formation. 
she has electric cheekbones, she is vulpine at the dinner table. 
she is the miracle of girlhood savagery.

​
Penumbra @ Stan State
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