✺

Hunger
by Ama Codjoe

When I rose into the cradle
of my mother’s mind,
she was but a girl,
fighting her sisters
over a flimsy doll.
It’s easy to forget
how noiseless I could be
spying from behind my
mother’s eyes
as her mother,
bulging with a baby,
a real-life Tiny Tears,
eclipsed the doorway
with a moon.
We all fell silent.
My mother soothed
the torn rag against
her chest and caressed
its stringy hair.
Even before the divergence
of girl from woman,
woman from mother,
I was there:
quiet as a vein,
quick as hot, brimming tears.
In the decades
before my birthday,
years before my mother’s
first blood, I was already
prized. Hers was a hunger
that mattered,
though sometimes
she forgot and I
dreamed the dream
of orange trees
then startled awake
days or hours later.
I could’ve been almost anyone.
Before I was a daughter,
I was a son, honeycomb
clenching the O of my mouth.
I was a mother—my own—
nursing a beginning.

✺