mother wound poems

A mother wound
lives under the skin.
Raw at first,
throbbing less in time.
It dwells into other losses
of the tongue
that grew mute, unraveled,
the morning sounds
of night-shift cracking bones,
damp cloth on feverish foreheads,
eggplant salad, complicit smiles.
A language of lacks, body as implement.
Slowly, one poem bears the next,
descending the page like a string tie.
At the end of the day, I weigh
the unsaid, the misspelt, the in-betweens.
The poem cracks. On the page,
the learned foreign letters
give pain a loud, bearable voice.
The wound tingles, the words breathe.
One dying leaves room for poetry.
Many other deaths follow.