My Mother Named Me America
without knowing that my coyote father
had been disappeared somewhere
in the wild whooping marshes of Socorro.
She could not know that his last gasping
thought was for the feel of her
long lashes
fluttering against his chest.
That was before I began
screaming with a hunger she couldn’t
to sate. My gummy voice was impossible
to understand,
just like the doctors
who hastened to clear her bed
for the next welfare case.
Later, when loss seeded her lungs
a wet whooping of her own
her native desert called to her between the shouts of
binners and sandwich-board men. Even
the cracked palms of the man who brought
blossoms
to the creek bank we called home
couldn’t hold her here.
If she had known, would she have stayed
at her uncle’s hacienda
until she couldn’t plead
no señor,
no, anymore. Would she have left
if she had known
her daughter’s voice would cry
those same words into the night?
At least here there was
a chance,
space to fill out her hopes.
Nowhere is perfect, but at least
here
my world is built with white words
and white violence.
Kathryn Collins’ essays and poetry have been published in CALYX, Flyaway Journal of Writing, The Rumpus, Months to Years, and Robo Book through Bank Heavy Press. She received her MA in Professional Fiction Writing from the University of Denver and currently works as a librarian. After a long period as an expat in Germany, Israel and Australia, she has returned home to the Rocky Mountains of Colorado.
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