Ritual

When you pray to your ancestors I pray too—

por favor, avó, não deixe isso ser verdade—but

I don’t ask them about the bolt piercing

the heart on your skin, or why I’m a decade late.

My mothers foretold that night you pulled me in,

foretold how you’d take my head in your

steel-trap hands. Listen: quando eu não estou

com você, estou pensando em você—can you hear it

over the coffee fields, the cries of the women

birthing in the dirt? Can you hear it underground,

deeper than the seeds and the roots and the cashbox

and the mantle? Down in the core I’m keening        

quando estou com você, estou pensando em beijar você;

down in the mantle I’m keening you home.

 

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Alyse Knorr is an assistant professor of English at Regis University and editor of Switchback Books. She is the author of the poetry collections Mega-City Redux (Green Mountains Review 2017), Copper Mother (Switchback Books 2016), and Annotated Glass (Furniture Press Books 2013), as well as the non-fiction book Super Mario Bros. 3 (Boss Fight Books 2016) and the poetry chapbooks Epithalamia (Horse Less Press 2015) and Alternates (dancing girl press 2014).