You are mother. You are a girl and fouryears old the day you learn to swim.Your father, a carpenter and a fisherof men, like God’s holy son, laysyou on a board and sets you on the waves.You are baptized in wonder. You believethe wood to be the plank of Noah’s Ark.You grow to believe a small thing can alterdestiny. The plank is removed. You area legend, the little girl conquering the ocean.The tides of your girlhood shape the shoresof your knowing. Your daughters question whyyou exhaust yourself with worry, ceding toconcern. Sea salt polished your toddler face.You bite your nails. Your daughters catcha whiff of salt seething from your tonsils. You,puzzled by the wilds before you, you do notrealize that you are already doing the unimaginable,raising one girl after another. The eldest is a sirenbearing your name. Your daughters beach whalesand conjure clouds. Your daughters are the workyou are forced to do and your desires for sonsswell. You abandon your daughters in expan-sive anxieties. You’re obsessed with sons, treadthe tears of King Henry’s wanton wives. Yousee fate as a buoy, cradling flesh. Your bodyis an unwavering presence before your husband.Your daughters resent lighthouses, welcometempests. Your daughters long to know you, sandstinging in their eyes. You want to reinvent yourself,chasing raindrops with your tongue, trying to be enoughfor someone’s grown son, baiting the heavens for a boy.
Baiting Boys
Feature Date
- April 6, 2022
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“Baiting Boys” from BREATH BETTER SPENT: LIVING BLACK GIRLHOOD: by DaMaris B. Hill.
Published by Bloomsburg on January 25, 2022.
Copyright © 2022 by DaMaris B. Hill.
All rights reserved.
Reproduced by Poetry Daily with permission.
DaMaris B. Hill is the author of Breath Better Spent: Living Black Girlhood (2022), A Bound Woman Is a Dangerous Thing: The Incarceration of African American Women from Harriet Tubman to Sandra Bland (2019) -a 2020 NAACP Image Award finalist for Outstanding Literary Work, The Fluid Boundaries of Suffrage and Jim Crow: Staking Claims in the American Heartland (2016), \Vi-zə-bəl\ \Teks-chərs\Visible Textures)( (2015). Similar to her creative work, Hill’s scholarly research is interdisciplinary. Hill is an Associate Professor of Creative Writing at the University of Kentucky. http://damarishill.com
New York, New York
"Urgent...luminous...Between sparkling homages to famous Black women like Aretha Franklin and poems that proclaim and mourn the loss of missing and murdered Black girls, Hill situates her own reckoning with Black girlhood...readers are lucky to be with her in these outstanding pages."
—Publishers Weekly, starred review
"A moving narrative-in-verse ode to the innocence, wonder, and complexities of Black girlhood."
—Ms. Magazine
"What you will read here is not just poetry, though. This book offers an education. This book bears witness. This book is a reckoning."
—Roxanne Gay on A Bound Woman is a Dangerous Thing
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