Mother reminds me:
Mother reminds me:
Mother reminds me:
Mother reminds me:
I remember:
A puffy-cheeked, glarey-eyed child
bares her tongue not in honor
but to strike with the wrath
of an embryo viper.
A big man called “Daddy”
isn’t angry like he ought to be,
is nonplussed like the dead pulse
of the pregnant rat in the apartment’s kitchenette.
“I don’t love you,” says the child to
the man Mommy dragged her
to America for.
(“He’ll slap me,” she thinks.)
“I don’t love you either,”
says the big man to the baby
the village they’d left prayed for him to have.
(“You’ll grow up,” he thinks.)
You may be my father
but you hate me like a kid.
Emmanuela Eneh is an English major and member of the BA/MA program. Although she has been obsessed with fiction writing ever since watching “Avatar: The Last Airbender” as a child, she began delving into poetry and nonfiction during her junior and senior years. She has found these mediums to be incredibly therapeutic methods of telling the story of what makes her up as an individual. She enjoys tabletop role-playing games, reading fanfiction, and playing video games.