Mirror
I sit
on this throne
of thorns.
The mirror looks at me.
It looked at my mother
marching in the rallies of the 70's
with placards, dismembered
ovaries
by clandestine irons
and the badly sutured memory
of a rag between her teeth:
in the room of word
robes yawned
having lunch
with towels drenched in pus,
and coffins.
It looked at my mother's
mother
in the cellar of the '40s
curling up
under coarse sacks
for grain was sized
by platelets, white with hunger,
while the streets huddled
tight in the Nazi rape.
The mirror looks at me.
I must get up,
but my back is a mutilated
forest.
A hurricane of new bombs
is howling, in the East;
it smells of uranium.
Someone exhumes clandestine irons:
my nation doesn't give a shit
about the women who will bite roots,
and in the room of word
the lunch bell rings.
I can barely imagine
my mother and her mother
counting the leftover branches
on a winter back.
I sit on this throne of thorns.
The mirror looks at me.
In my liquid eyes,
perhaps,
the glow that flickered
in my mother's eyes.
By Bartleby Adams
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