Monsoon
When I was born, my mother stood over
a daughterless cradle.
She planted me anyway; into the wrong soil,
fed me a longing not mine, watered me until my leaves
came in sharp as teeth. I grew roots that slithered like serpents
toward a sun that kept limping away.
They told me a woman’s story is a vine trained along a fence.
But each time the word girl was grafted into my mouth,
a thorn took root. Families do this: water the wrong flower
until it curls around the right one and strangles it silent.
One night I caught the moon bleaching the camellias bone-white.
My mother, wrists trembling above the sink, hissed,
Don’t do this to me as I cut my hair. The swollen silver outside
dripped down the mirror—milk from a cracked breast—
marking the border between her inheritance and my escape.
Later, unbraiding the hair she grieved, I found ribbons inside,
thin as umbilical cords. All the daughters she prayed for
tangled there. I couldn’t hold you, she whispered,
cupping my fallen strands like funeral ash.
It was then I learned she wasn’t mourning the hair at all.
Mama, language cocks the trigger long before the gun appears.
Morning scatters us like seeds across a land that pretends
it can’t see us bloom. Some raise their sons like fortresses
and daughters like porcelain, not knowing some of us
are both—and neither—and ruined beautifully.
Let them stare.
We drag the horizon over our shoulders like scorched wings.
I fold it down my throat until it spits fire. Mama,
my mouth is gasoline, my throat a firepit. I gnaw my feathers,
bite my own skin, using the body they keep insisting
belongs to you.
Soon the morning arrived pale and aching;
sunlight pooling like egg whites on the floorboards.
Still, I am here.
And I, cloud-child, lifted your love to my mouth
and breathed in your monsoon until it filled my lungs,
until I carried the storm the way you once carried me.
Dave Thompson tied for second place in the Charles Crupi Memorial Poetry Contest for Michigan High School Students. He is a student at Interlochen Arts Academy.
