A Trinity I Can Believe In, Mother
by Kika Dorsey

Your crooked Roman nose
showed up on my daughter’s face
after she slid from my womb,
slick as a fish scrambling to
return to the river’s source.
My daughter barely knew you,
the bone broth soup you cooked
smelling like marrow and sweat,
the thick Austrian accent like syrup,
like a cluster of stars in the mountains.
My own daughter dropped
below the watermill that churned, churned
for her body to have a seat at the feast
where you could not join,
your last language the mother tongue
which I never passed onto my daughter,
so I wove it between us until silence prevailed.
If there is a trinity I can believe in,
it’s this: mother, daughter, another daughter,
eggs multiplying, a cornucopia
spilling an apple onto the ground,
a bleating suckling in the pasture
begging for infinity in the air
it is now forced to breathe.
That kind of exile.
Like damning the fruit, the harvest,
what the eggs drop to the soil.



 

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