I craved for them. But now I choose to sift these ones from the
ones he took from me.
Do not blame me if I hold them tight. You can call me a mother
who drank fire all alone. Smoke darkens the face of a mother
who hustled children like food & cowries.
it is how we string names to our parent
& i find my father in each letter,
such as how he died on a woman’s chest
with a gin buried in his breast pocket,
So they put the books he has never read in his casket, and let the sea have him.
This is how to bury a hundred year old Poet Laureate, who exchanged
his childhood for a volume of books on how to cure dementia.