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ars poetica

A walk through a field        carrying                    my mother’s wounds 
            The glorious                gap                    in my grandmother’s               teeth            
The iron          swallowing                      the wrinkles                 from my sister’s dress
            My stubborn                brothers           throw their heads back            in laughter   
I marvel                       the harvest                                of their uncombed kinks  
            A phantom of a father                                     the tremor of his voice       
My mother silent exorcist         on a good day          
            The roaches praising                                               the empty of the night     
The oven open               its yawn devours                                 the brittle cold            
            Winter unyielding                           it wills                  to break         
My grandmother and her children         squatters in an           empty brownstone  
The passing down           of how to thaw       the absence of money              We do not count  
             The lessons of                growing up                         without       
Instead—     
My great-aunt remembers           her mother                    a master of bearing joy  
             While cleaning others’ homes              how ample humility                 runs in the
caretaker                 
When she is forced         to forget everything              I watch her in a facility    
             The quiet blink of her eyes                  a drowning  past            she’s unable to tell
me                                           When she dies          I visit her home           the land      
expands                  a restless      root     
             She is buried               next to her husband             
Who is buried           next to her daughter        who is buried           next to her son 
             Who is not       buried         next to his nephew           who dies         
Many years later                        in utter silence            a memory              revives      an
ancestor                                                                 Who unearths                          itself to
marvel           the vast             and  fertile         infinite



The first line of this poem is inspired by Sarah Borjas’ poem “I Know the Name of the Desert.”
Picture
Henry Farrer. Winter Scene in Moonlight, 1869. The Metropolitan Museum of Art.

Tatiana Johnson-Boria (she/her) is a writer, artist, and educator. Her writing explores identity, inherited trauma, and what it means to heal. Her work has been selected as a finalist for the Prairie Schooner Book Prize, the Black Warrior Review Poetry Contest (2020), and others. She is a 2021 MacDowell Fellowship recipient and a recipient of the 2021 Brother Thomas fellowship. She has received honorable mention for the 2021 and 2020 Academy of American Poets Prize and is a 2017 Pushcart Prize nominee. She is also a 2021 Tin House Scholar. Find her work in or forthcoming at Ploughshares, Kenyon Review, Pleiades, and others.
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