the blues, reproductive by Aurielle Marie

Winner of the 2019 Los Angeles Review Literary Awards, in the category of poetry.

Final Judge: Matty Layne Glasgow

See my hands? They strong hands. They hold worlds, they break men
open with a snap. My hands is strong hands and I learned them from my
mother’s mother. She had a pinch that could end a nerve, could bruise
steel with her hands. Somehow not strong enough to live forever, but
she shole did live. I see her in her grave turning over when she hear
my mother tell me she too had an abortion. My mother tell me our strong
hands held a small bloody part of her, and let it go. My mother’s hands
checked the time & it wasn’t time, & that’s that on that. My mother
& my grandmother gave me my hands. My mother & my grandmother
gave me timeliness. I am the daughter of the daughter of the clock. I am
the incarnate of a just hour. I am the first born my mother was meant to have.
She tells me so, every morning. I make up the difference, I hang tough. I will
tell my daughter one day what it felt like to sever, the choice I held to make
a way for her. I will hand her our inheritance, our punctual strength. I will tell
her what it means to be churned in the dirt by loss. I will tell my daughter to question
everything asking to be housed in her. If it ever isn’t time, I will love her and the empty
ache. My mother taught me how & now the men have come for my mother. I will
teach my daughter, and then the men will come for me. The men don’t know what they do
not know. The men’s clocks are too late, or very early. The men think it is a time before
my grandmother, and my grandmother isn’t here to laugh, to tell them how wrong they are.
When I learned my hands and my mother’s were the same kind of criminal, I wept. Then rejoiced
our kindred, beautiful strong. We could have had a fate worse than this. I could be the daughter
of the mother of regret. I could be the mother of too many daughters. My child will ask me
why the words have been outlawed. My child will one day question what the men did to her
birthright to choose what grows and what unroots. In the prison yard we’ll water herbs
and collect them. From a jail cell I’ll tell my daughter to tuck them into her palm. It is impossible to
make a birthright illegal I’ll tell her do not tell show the men your hands. make a tea from these
leaves, draw a bath &
…………………………………………………………………………………warm a coat hanger.

Poet, essayist and cultural strategist Aurielle Marie is an Atlanta native and a child of the Deep South. She received her bachelor’s in Social Justice Strategy and Hip-Hop Theory from the Evergreen State College, and is an MFA candidate at the University of Alabama. Aurielle’s poetry has been featured or is forthcoming in the TriQuarterly, Southeast Review, Black Warrior, BOAAT Journal, Sycamore Review, Adroit Journal, Vinyl Poetry, Palette Poetry, and Ploughshares. She’s received invitations to fellowships from Lambda Literary, VONA Voices, and Tin House. Aurielle is a 2017 winner of the Blue Mesa Review poetry award, and she’s the Lambda Literary 2019 Poetry Emerging Writer-in-Residence. She won the 2019 Ploughshares Emerging Writers Award for Poetry.