It's #tbt! Enjoy this great one from SWWIM Every Day's archives!
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.
Alyse Knorr is an associate professor of English at Regis University and co-editor of Switchback Books. She is the author of three poetry collections and four poetry chapbooks as well as two non-fiction books, including, most recently, GoldenEye (Boss Fight Books 2022). Her work has appeared or is forthcoming in The New Republic, Poetry Magazine, Alaska Quarterly Review, Denver Quarterly, and The Georgia Review, among others. She received her MFA from George Mason University.
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