Summer 2020 Archive
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
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
