Mother & Crone
You are the winter I relearn
when a hard frost strips the herbs
to blackmats overnight
pass over our house,
I’m behind the glass
saying don’t take my daughter
when it all goes white.
No wonder, old mother
that every ache of the marrow
echoes to premonition,
cold scissors in the wind
snipping people from their bodies,
lost kites in flight. No wonder
we weight our hands with books
and coffees and groceries
when we can’t be sure about gravity,
skies magnetized, tugging, no wonder
we’ve made such a tangle down here
clawing for grip.
This is why I tie her to my body, why
she twines both hands in my hair
when she’s sleepy, when she feels
herself starting
to drift.
Incantation
in the night i wove my hair
tangles saltthick with pricks of pain
tattooing the blanket over my brain
runes, am i rune-ing?
am i glyphing this down?
tamping and tying the spell
as roots tie the ground
do i summon do i ward
chanting i have to stay here when
in my poems the nouns are pluraling
we and us and thou
winters snows and nights
mothers we whisper, calling up
our salts
welling our waters
never knew how many waters
were laking around in us
wombs and uterus
uteruses?
we can no longer speak
names we love
what begins in prayers
spirals in frostfractals in pleading
with we suspect
our own madnesses
dreads we could see
in the patterning snows
just once
we want to stop
connecting dots
Brianna Flavin is a poet from Saint Paul, MN. She is a Loft Mentor Series Fellow in Poetry as well as a volunteer writing mentor in the Minnesota Prison Writing Workshop. Her work has appeared in Waxing Literary, the Nashville Review, The Cresset and others.