where all, we flowers

where all with flowers your first bloody lips
in grass from garden backyard toy chest hours
the thing is wrath epitaph sepulchral thirst look
Chesapeake look lord Baltimore ma
her Sunday word slammed closed inside you
you the girl who doesn’t get barrettes
no bowl of braids heads down the stairs ma is
a long well away night air flotsam winter
granny mama sees you she lingers in light
saint like above up lets your legs toddle alone
travel steps abaloneously you are slipping already
out of mother harbor baby blue your body
whorl struck by every knuckle ma ma ma
no daughter of pearl

Copyright © 2021 by Jasmine Reid. Originally published in Poem-a-Day on July 16, 2021, by the Academy of American Poets.

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“This poem recounts an early memory of mine as a little, little girl falling down the steps between my mother and grandmother, both because I was too small to be walking down such a long flight on my own and because I was swimming in shoes that were too big for me. In this way, I make a nautical intervention into the injury of being an unacknowledged daughter, of falling into wreckage rather than harbor. I make a nest in the wreckage, parent girl and surface daughter.”
—Jasmine Reid