Life Cycles
My mother says we’re strapped to a cosmic wheel, and you can’t just press a start button and expect to escape suffering. But Ama takes me on Sundays, and we run through the aisles laughing, flinging open the doors to every machine, witnessing rebirth: a crow gushing out like ink, a doe climbing out on wobbly legs, an octopus blended into jelly.
I try saying a prayer for a NICU baby
I hear her saying the Lord’s prayer to them while they squirm and bat away the sticky readers on their little bodies. she is gentle. she has the patience only a mother could have. no matter how many times her children have kicked at her stomach and cried she has always come back to nurture them. she smiles at them and says, “Amen.”
Hopscotch
There amongst weeds and wildflowers grown higher than my head–there, hidden from plain sight in this vacant lot amid burnt-out buildings, I join a troop of secret girls, accepted without question as one of their own.
Flesh
And this pretty-ass basilisk pulls up, talm bout “you so fine,” which duh I know, I got a man that tell me that every day? And I also got the life-giving soul-sucking coochie so?? But It was kinda fine too so I was half listening. And It’s spittin all this shit about the good fruit, yadda yadda don’t care already know, but tell me why It says: “this one’ll give you knowledge.” Which is what I wanted from jump. To know.
Observation of Other Suspected Mental Condition
She tells me again about her warehouse in China, about the dolls she met there, until we hear my mother whisper, “I’ve never tried taking it away,” and then we are listening carefully. “An old baby monitor will do,” the man waves his hand. “No need to buy anything new.”
On Karia
He says to me, maybe we don’t know the books, but around here we know things, too, things you don’t. His wife: We do. And here’s something everyone here learns when they’re a little baby: Jinns only appear to two types of people: those who believe too much and those who don’t believe at all.