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.