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No One Told Me When I Became a Mother
​by Angela María Spring


​I would            become                        every               mother             now
 
every   child                I see     hear                read    is built by        my womb
 
cells     sparked            from spontaneous       self-                 expulsion
 
every kitchen              table                painted with fingerprint          smudges each
 
playground      joyful shriek              grocery store               tantrum            every lost
 
spelling           bee      scraped-         knee kiss         Braxton Hicks            contraction
 
eighth-             grade   graduation       tongue snowflake        catch    every slide
 
home   unpaid            school lunch    daycare           nap      emergency
 
room                fever                look both        ways                before              crossing
 
the street                     every first        mamadadababa           bedtime          story
 
dinosaur-         bone                discovery        sleep over       Nutcracker      ballet
 
every tamal     sold in a parking lot                run through                desert mountain
 
toe       dip in the ocean           three-   thousand          mile     walk    every hand
 
forced              to let                go        by       the current       each small       soft     
 
body                            pulled from the Rio                Grande            unburied        
 
by        the sand           the wind          mine                            mine                mine    mine               

Angela María Spring is the owner of Duende District, a mobile boutique bookstore by and for people of color. She holds an M.F.A. from Sarah Lawrence College and you can find her recent poems in PANK, Rust + Moth, Radar Poetry, Glass: A Journal of Poetry, and forthcoming in Borderlands: Texas Poetry Review and Pilgrimage. Her essays and reviews are at Catapult, LitHub and Tor.com. Follow her online at Twitter at @BurquenaBoricua.
ISSN 2157-8079
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