Signs of Impending Matriarchal Departure or Fair? by Alafia Nicole Sessions

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There are ways to know the mother 

will leave. She no longer cooks with Morton salt

though pressures rise like aspirations

and the soup still tastes of tears. 

You often find her buried with tiger worms or

writing red-inked checks to God in her sleep.

The mother will say she’s planting strawberry seeds.

She is measuring her weight against eternity.

One by one she snaps the necks of collard leaves.

This beheading will feel like a rehearsal.

She stacks the green palms like thick pages 

of plenty in a book where dreams come true.

Ten years later you learn but don’t understand the truth: 

a pretty man forced his spade into her soil, left 

the shovel’s spit to summer there. From lucid dream 

of meadow marred slipped eight-pound winter harvest.

Even though the baby’s fair, life is not. Instead of leave

she will relieve the pain of strangers, give them her breast.

Her life force leaking like fentanyl from taut tube,

she dreams of exits, she neglects.  

On ocher-carpet stairs, for a petty forgetting,

she will strike you semi-conscious. 

In this vision you sprout pedicles, soft antlers, 

the kind that inflicts only minimal damage. 

Confusion would be a welcome state, but there 

are small, red pools to blot, belts to re-coil 

after casual violence. In beta-state, you wonder

if the dust she leaves blooms violets.

You become a mother and all signs point to 

your demise. Your mother says she will come 

heal you. She does not. Three years later she will

hold your dreaming baby, the fairest of them all. 

She will sharpen the deadliest knife in your kitchen, 

slice white fur off softening strawberries. The mother will 

apologize, then fantasize about why she abandoned you.

She will leave without finding the answer. 

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Alafia Nicole Sessions is a black poet and mother living in Los Angeles, where she currently works as an educator, actress, herbalist and doula. Her poetry has been published or is forthcoming in Indiana Review, Tahoma Literary Review, Green Mountains Review, The Sonora Review, Glint Literary Journal and elsewhere. Alafia is a recipient of the 2021 Sustainable Arts Foundation award and Randolph College’s Elizabeth Dwiggins ‘94 award. She is a candidate in the low residency MFA program at Randolph College. 

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8 August 2022