the story of stars that once were

The stories appeared like morning fog. Like faint star matter trailing her skin. Her curly hair. Her explosive anger. Her diminution. Why was she so difficult? What made her so frustrated and frustrating?

Maybe it was the smoke. The deep, long inhales during pregnancy. A white snake with nowhere much to go in her mother’s squat, Slavic body except to slither around the cluster of cells growing inside. Her mother was so small during pregnancy and gave birth to a tiny baby.

The baby absorbed the anger that rode in on the star matter that made its way from one generation to the next. She screamed from her crib pudgy hands gripping white rails and high-pitched wails and she thinks she recalls it all of these years later. Did she shriek, “Out. Me. Crib!” over and over again? Or was that her mother’s story she sucked in through lungs kept strong from screaming?

She is her mother’s story just as her mother is the stars. And those stars burn bright showering her with the ashes of her mother’s life. She is her mother’s story of righteousness and rage.

All of these stories imprinted upon her skin, in the language of cosmic matter carrying the weight of a woman’s trauma.

Her story did not start in the womb or in the moments when she was plunged from her mother’s body into the hands of a waiting…