prompt 4 – just on the other side of stars

“…these existing plays have already begun answering the questions of where we are all came from” as if we had no idea our stories held our babies like pits in peaches and all our wishes lived just on the other side of the stars next to the ones who held our names in shaking hands until we return from this burning planet to hold our babies once more in the breaths of our grandmothers’ prayers for our waking when walking became more than anyone could manage in these days of dirt and images the opposite of sonograms singing stories of life when our babies are more than just bones and dust filling our mouths with anything else but gasping

these plays these days take our stolen questions into the rib cages of all those babies so we can sing behind them in the resonance of this earth who loves them more than the land could feed them medicine for this nation’s plan for us all in the days when they wanted us all to vanish

the questions of where we all came from hold the marrow in me so i don’t leak on the ground like fractured fiberglass oozing black gold on the bottom of rivers held up by crimson relatives breathing water to keep us all alive to tell the stories of our families living in the spaces between letters between lines between questions of how coming here would be so many beginnings

2 thoughts on “prompt 4 – just on the other side of stars

  1. This is one of those poems that holds universes of stories and ideas and love and sadness and, and, and,

    I kept reading and re-reading it, the flow of it catching me like a tide.

    It was really hard for me to pick one line, but i did, and here it is:

    “our stories held our babies like pits in peaches and all our wishes lived just on the other side of the stars next to the ones who held our names in shaking hands “

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