Safia Elhillo

The Matriarch

remembers us most by what we loved as children
chicken purchased in buckets crisped in its copper skin

melon sliced in cubes & piled into a bowl
tiny candies from the worn leather of her purse & hands

left alone for hours she watches television hunger pooling
in her upturned face daughter of a city named

for the elephant’s trunk city like a muscle its thousand
invisible fibers its cording of vein i was not there

but i remember her hundred shining wedding spoons
ankles bare beneath her governed body

clouds at her hairline wistful girl at a window
imagining a sports car the color of clotted cream

silk scarves for her hair cairo & europe & europe
silk dress whispering at the ankle a future conjured

from magazines & the gentle crackling of the radio
i was not there but i remember her elfin & unpainted

in the earliest photographs our face before
it became mine the hips before they became mine

spread west & east beneath the strained cotton of every skirt
air clotted with gardenias wilting in the heat

you creak at the knees & tend bougainvillea|
ache at the spine at the root black sesame

& black cumin coriander seed ground
to heaps of powder it is always summer when i know you

& the cucumbers on the counter are warm & soft
forgetting their hard snap their consonants

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Safia Elhillo is the author of The January Children (University of Nebraska Press, 2017), Girls That Never Die (One World/Random House, 2021), and a forthcoming novel in verse (Make Me A World/Random House, 2021). Co-editor of the anthology Halal If You Hear Me (Haymarket, 2019), she is a Wallace Stegner Fellow in poetry at Stanford University.