I’m thinking of a gourd.
Maybe there’s a thread
inside. Like a thin
long thread.
It hangs from the neck,
searches to stitch, latch
with the stupefied gaze of a calf still wet
from birth.
Maybe I’m convinced
it’s from my mother’s blouse
from one of those sepia dreams about silk
on her shoulders,
swallowed by a man’s basin of a mouth.
I reach.
I’m thinking I can reach
inside the gourd, but I can’t.
The neck, you see,
it’s the beautiful
curved
neck of swan
searching
glass lake
Liz Femi is a Nigerian-American writer, actor, and an NAACP Theater Award Nominee for her solo play, Take Me to the Poorhouse. A recipient of Writeability’s Right to Write Award, her work has been published in Wild Roof Journal, Stone Poetry Quarterly, Streetlight Magazine, West Trade Review and Good River Review. She is based in Los Angeles and Atlanta and is a 2024 Pushcart Prize winner.
