An ESME Poetry Showcase Award submission
Generations
I.
I watched my mother die.
I watched my mother watch her
mother die and before that I
watched my grandmother watch
her mother die.
II.
Big Mama said
Hurt people hurt people.
She wadded and rolled the
idea around in between her
tongue and cheek and
teeth before she spit out
the words like the tobacco
she chewed. When Granny
was a girl with an iron
face and ashy knees
Big Mama taught her
women’s work—
to cook, to launder,
to push his children
from her 15-year-old
womb and ask for nothing
in return, to shell peas until
her fingertips purpled,
to make macaroni and
cheese by tunneling
a hole into steaming
pasta and pouring into
it a mixture of flour,
milk, salt, pepper,
faint remembrances
of his overworked fist
in her left eye, a secret
prayer for the babies
(especially the girls),
a sour recollection
of the misses commenting
on the remarkable
cleanliness of her kids.
Granny never forgot.
III.
More than anything
I remember the taut,
tanned skin of their
foreheads below my
pressed lips. Somehow,
sleep becomes a woman
after a life of selfless labor—
lifting loads intended
for the backs of men,
soldiering quiet through
eras and movements and
hurricanes like untasted
honey in misplaced hives.
Kristie Robin Johnson is a native of Augusta, Georgia. She is currently a student in the MFA Creative Writing program at Georgia College and State University in Milledgeville. Her work has appeared in and/or is forthcoming in Rigorous literary magazine, Atlanta Free Speech, and other publications.
