She Knows
“leave the world behind” by Hannah Wool
She Knows
April Morales
I think my mom is afraid that
if she tells me about the old country
I will be lost.
She knows how beautiful it is
how easy it is to wander through dirt roads
and cemeteries filled with dying flowers and flickering candles.
She knows how the old country is prideful
how it likes to swallow great lives whole
and leave songs for sad women to sing
out metal windows into the
cool night air.
She knows how far the old country’s reach is
how it travels through the air
in sweet, bright flowers
in the perfumes of girls with long, long hair.
She knows because she never stopped listening.
She ran away, but never kept her eyes off
her first home.
And in the heavy, unrelentingly humid nights
swollen with discarded bottles of cheap spirits
weighty upon heads stuffed full of biting memory,
She speaks back.
In her bed, under pale blue sheets —
icy sleets of frozen “grief honey” drops —
she becomes another weary woman
staring out into the dark,
singing a grief-stricken song
for the life
she almost led.
