Inheritance

Diane Macklin

Mom brought her Southern hunger

fried okra poke salad pecans and black walnuts

Encrusted in her grandmother’s cast iron skillet

Forged from Delta blues

toil weathered hands choppin’ cotton knotted

Mom stole away riding Greyhound to New York Port Authority

Escaping Mississippi’s troubled waters

white-hooded death night canters

She unspooled Southern lilt from tongue

currency for northern deliverance

All the mothers before

marrow moan “Free at last, Thank Almighty! Free at last”

into each womb knit soul

mixed kneaded rolled out

foraged sustenance

scrapped from necessity’s barrel

flour sack shift dresses and bedsheets

water pumped out back

stewed wild onion and rabbit

Aunt Sadie’s grape preserve on scratch-made biscuits

Mom nursed me

on optimism’s milk

Raising her ancestral dream

Scrap metal heart

tool and die cast oblation

I scoop handfuls of sun

Savor its sweet blaze

glowburning beneath my ribs

exhaling precious embers

We rise and fade too soon