All winter I let the wave carry me back to the river, remembering the folk songs of my kin. At night I follow the trail of women who came before me, slip into a tangled past where their hum seals my ears. I wander through their underworld and eat of its bounty. Soon poem after poem fills my mouth with pomegranate seeds. At night I burn a fever, unspooling red from my throat, determined to make sense of my doomed matriarchy. My inheritance. My mother lore. Bending over the page in my basement apartment, I try to write the ache into something tangible.
