From India’s dirt forests, into the elephant chest of the West we brought a child.
Years erupt on skin. You are larger than Canada!—you are not a child.
We all see things we do not want to see. In a white world, my father left
my mother—she knew she would be a prisoner as soon as she got a child.
Distance between school and war crushed to powder.
Against the gunshot: a child. In the mugshot: a child.
I am a good person, I live for others. If those others too
live for others, are we not all alone, thought a child.
I wished to kill god when he stabbed needles in my womb.
Yet I have known women who forgave—forgot a child.
Kneeling on ice, eating mantras, wheting candles, piercing dolls—
what tree did I not noose with the holy thread when I sought a child!
Each week a new fruit—pomegranate seed, peach, papaya.
Time—the sole difference between a blood clot, a child.
And so it was Shannan entered the deafening world.
Let me write you a song, compose you a sonata, child.
Shannan Mann has been awarded or placed for the Palette Love and Eros Prize, Foster Poetry Prize, Peatsmoke Summer Contest, Rattle Poetry Prize, Pacific Spirit Poetry Prize and Frontier Award for New Poets. Her poems appear in Rattle, Ocotillo Review, Strange Horizons, & elsewhere. Find her at https://linktr.ee/shannanmania.
