"Hunger" by Ama Codjoe

View this email on a browser Forward to a friend April 2, 2019   Hunger   Ama Codjoe

When I rose into the cradle of my mother's mind, she was but a girl, fighting her sisters over a flimsy doll. It's easy to forget how noiseless I could be spying from behind my mother's eyes as her mother, bulging with a baby, a real-life Tiny Tears, eclipsed the doorway with a moon. We all fell silent. My mother soothed the torn rag against her chest and caressed its stringy hair. Even before the divergence of girl from woman, woman from mother, I was there: quiet as a vein, quick as hot, brimming tears. In the decades before my birthday, years before my mother's first blood, I was already prized. Hers was a hunger that mattered, though sometimes she forgot and I dreamed the dream of orange trees then startled awake days or hours later. I could've been almost anyone. Before I was a daughter, I was a son, honeycomb clenching the O of my mouth. I was a mother— my own—nursing a beginning.            Copyright © 2019 by Ama Codjoe. Originally published in Poem-a-Day on April 2, 2019, by the Academy of American Poets. About This Poem   "Inserting the speaker into this imagined scene felt like looking at myself through a many-mirrored wall that is also, somehow, a window. Lately, I've been thinking about what my own desires are made of, and this poem led me away from myself into the desires that made me." —Ama Codjoe   Ama Codjoe is the author of the chapbook Blood of the Air, winner of the eighth annual Drinking Gourd Chapbook Poetry Prize, forthcoming from Northwestern University Press in April 2020. She is the recipient of a 2019 Creative Writing Fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts. A social justice and arts facilitator, she lives in New York City. Photo Credit: Jamie Harmon "Origin Story" by Karin Gottshall "Duet" by Duy Doan "Theories of Time and Space" by Natasha Trethewey April Guest Editor: Tracy K. Smith   Thanks to Tracy K. Smith, poet laureate of the United States and author of Wade in the Water (Graywolf Press, 2019), who curated Poem-a-Day for this month's weekdays. Read a Q&A with Smith about her curatorial approach this month and find out more about our guest editors for the year. Thanks for being a part of the Academy of American Poets community. To learn about other programs, including National Poetry Month, Poem in Your Pocket Day, the annual Poets Forum, and more, visit Poets.org.   You are receiving this e-mail because you elected to subscribe to our mailing list. If you would like to unsubscribe, please click here.   © Academy of American Poets 75 Maiden Lane, Suite 901, New York, NY 10038