More on: mother

But it unfolded itself, and, like a long-held secret, its wings swelled wide enough to span her palm. Then she saw the color it had been keeping close: hind wings emblazoned with what shone like blue eyes, rimmed with gold and mounted on a concentric field of black.

At three, I saw the shade of living light. / At eight, I was enclosed as an oblate. / The universe is an egg, I said, / and the nuns promoted me.

You are not here. / Just this precious, flawed body, briefly home / to your soul.

Jon Henry photographs Black mothers and sons across America.

The racetrack, famously built before we knew of such things, straddled a fault line at the joint of two very active plates. As a result, fissures spread through the walls of the old grandstand like capillaries. The world was tearing it apart naturally.

The counselor says that I am in the romance phase. She is right. I am in love with heroin and with the needle, the whole ritual, in love even with the bruises on my arms.

It wasn’t long before I began
pinching myself for fat, for acne, learned
to hate my body in a swimsuit, in clothes.

Bible open. On her lap. Same page for years.
Her white hair. Spooky red ink. Deuteronomy.

Why pray for the dead if not for this,
for God’s speed on their journey, home,
beneath the burden of the proof they bear.