Michelle Ashmore

Weaving Us Home

We sleep with all the windows in the house open,
sugar cane spiders crawling in & out as they please.
The wind comes in from the ocean to wrap herself
around us as my father snores heavy into the night.
Often, I steal away to the garden where I dance among
the yellow & red hibiscus, the softwhitepink plumeria
lifting their faces to greet mine. My toes dig into the cold earth
as stars watch overhead.
In the morning my brother finds me under the banana tree,
the sun beginning its rise over the horizon, a fat black & yellow spider
weaving her dewdrop web above my head. He carries me still sleeping
back into the house. In my dreams I am small enough to fit in the pocket
of his t-shirt. In my dreams the spider is my mother, weaving us home
& my brother carries me here, lays my sleeping body on the web

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Michelle Ashmore is a Native Hawaiian poet living and writing in Northwest Arkansas. She graduated from Hendrix College in 2019, where she studied Creative Writing and was the Poetry & Nonfiction Editor for Hendrix's literary magazine, The Aonian. Her work has been published in Plain China, The Olive Press, Honey & Lime Literature, Hawai'i Review, RookieMag, and elsewhere.