She Knows

April Morales

I think my mom is afraid that

if she tells me about the old country

I will be lost.

She knows how beautiful it is

how easy it is to wander through dirt roads

and cemeteries filled with dying flowers and flickering candles.

She knows how the old country is prideful

how it likes to swallow great lives whole

and leave songs for sad women to sing

out metal windows into the

cool night air.

She knows how far the old country’s reach is

how it travels through the air

in sweet, bright flowers

in the perfumes of girls with long, long hair.

She knows because she never stopped listening.

She ran away, but never kept her eyes off

her first home.

And in the heavy, unrelentingly humid nights

swollen with discarded bottles of cheap spirits

weighty upon heads stuffed full of biting memory,

She speaks back.

In her bed, under pale blue sheets —

icy sleets of frozen “grief honey” drops —

she becomes another weary woman

staring out into the dark,

singing a grief-stricken song

for the life

she almost led.