The water for coffee gathersits song. I am a hearth of spidersthese days: a nest of trying.No one like me gets old. Growingup is about keeping secretsand pretending everythingis fine. I still cannot impressthe woman who whipped meinto being. I thought we mightsing of the wire woundround the wound of feeling,hundreds of hot air balloonsfilling the sky in my chest.Our mothers haven’t learnedto wrap their bones in eachsmall grief they’ve found. Againand again I write to you regrettingmy tongue. I was driftwoodtrying to remember what I hadbroken from to get here.
Cento for My Mother
Rage Hezekiah
Feature Date
- July 28, 2023
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Copyright © 2023 by Rage Hezekiah.
All rights reserved.
Reproduced by Poetry Daily with permission.
Rage Hezekiah is a Cave Canem, Ragdale, and MacDowell Fellow who earned her MFA from Emerson College. Her new collection, Yearn, was a Diode Editions Book Contest winner, and a finalist for the Lambda Literary Award, the Vermont Book Award, and the Audre Lorde Award for Lesbian Poetry. She is the author of Unslakable (Paper Nautilus Press, 2019) and Stray Harbor (Finishing Line Press, 2019) and serves as Interviews Editor at The Common. Rage’s poems have appeared in the Academy of American Poets Poem-a-Day, AGNI, and several other journals and anthologies. You can find more of her work at ragehezekiah.com.
In 1997, English Professor Mitch Wieland approached then-Provost Daryl Jones with the idea to start a new literary journal at Boise State University. The journal was envisioned as a precursor to Boise State's upcoming MFA Program in Creative Writing. While a graduate student in the MFA Program at the University of Alabama, Wieland had served as fiction editor of The Black Warrior Review. Provost Jones funded the new journal and chose its name. Over the next fifteen months, the entire first issue was edited and produced by Professor Wieland and Quinn Pritchard, a Master’s student in the English Department. The inaugural issue was published in late 1998.
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