when you’re a white child
and everybody says
No Politics At The Table
you don’t understand
the priority
you are being fed
is to not offend
the white faces
seated around it
but now I am a woman
seated at the table
with Black friends
sick to my stomach
because my family
ate up white supremacy
for dinner
and I thought
it was polite
she’s probably grown woman by now
the tears evaporated into a cloud
and came down on me again
but I wonder if that’s just because
they heard what you said
about what’s between them
you can decide today that you don’t love
what you did yesterday
you can reject
the half broken things
and ask for whole
Sometimes I feel like I’m inside a tornado
the cycloptic heart pumps wild
full of mud and death and memory
a mouth full of peaches
turning to ash
Do good mothers run out of milk?
Do they weep into their pillows at night
mourning their children’s childhoods
as they sleep quietly beside them?
Do good mothers take their medicine
or is it only
the others whose hearts and bodies
were made to love
without store-bought serotonin
Katie Hampton 