Emily Bludworth de Barrios

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Collecting Sticks

The girls wore the names of their fathers like little necklaces

The boys wore the names of their fathers like jewels I mean like tattoos

The names of the mothers fell off

Like how a bird’s nest erodes inside months

It’s okay     Months are always making new girls

Girls make themselves into new mothers the way a bird collects sticks

The girls wear their fathers’ names and then inscribe their husbands’ names:     a tattoo of a necklace around the throat

The names of the mothers fell off

Pryor     York     Bond     Moore

There aren’t any others I know

Mama York making biscuits in her little wood-burning stove

A mother didn’t have a name to bestow

The mother an antique lullaby     A nest is only made of sticks and spit and dirt

A sweet voice breaks down into soil

Shouting into the closed-off years

Dies.     and here’s another little self

Who dies.     and pushes a piece of herself into the future

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EMILY BLUDWORTH DE BARRIOS is a poet whose books and chapbooks include Women, Money, Children, Ghosts (Sixth Finch, 2016), Splendor (H_NGM_N, 2015), and Extraordinary Power (Factory Hollow Press, 2014). Recent work can be read in Iterant, Prelude, and Electric Literature. Her website is www.emilybludworthdebarrios.com.