This is how clay becomes flesh: dirt and grit clumping with saliva, bits of sand wedged between gum and tooth. In my mother’s mouth: her palate alive with humus: a crush of chalk threading down her throat: and somewhere deep within her gut: a Galatea, milk white, translucent: a creature
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Recorded for Poem-a-Day, March 12, 2018.
My Nothings
You, who have bowed your head, shed another season of antlers at my feet, for years you fall asleep to the lullabies of dolls, cotton-stuffed and frayed, ears damp with sleep and saliva, scalps knotted with yarn, milk-breath, and yawns. Birth is a torn ticket stub, a sugar cone wrapped in a paper sleeve, the blackest ice. It has been called irretrievable, a foreign coin, the moon’s slip, showing, a pair of new shoes rubbing raw your heel. I lose the back of my earring and bend the metal in such a way as to keep it fastened to me. In the universe where we are strangers, you kick with fury, impatient as grass. I have eaten all your names. In this garden you are blue ink, baseball cap wishbone, pulled teeth, wet sand, hourglass. There are locks of your hair in the robin’s nest and clogging the shower drain. You, who are covered in feathers, who have witnessed birth give birth to death and watched death suck her purple nipple. You long for a mother like death’s mother, want to nurse until drunk you dream of minnows swimming through your ears—their iridescence causing you to blink, your arms twitching. Even while you sleep I feed you.
Copyright © 2018 by Ama Codjoe. Originally published in Poem-a-Day on March 12, 2018, by the Academy of American Poets.
Copyright © 2018 by Ama Codjoe. Originally published in Poem-a-Day on March 12, 2018, by the Academy of American Poets.

Ama Codjoe
Ama Codjoe received a 2017 Rona Jaffe Writer’s Award to support the completion of her forthcoming first collection, Iterations of Being. She lives in New York City where she serves as visiting assistant professor of social justice and inclusion at The New School.