Poetry jam, Steinbrenner High School media center

My blood is a line stretching back to
old places and brutal ways of
women who keep their mouths shut.
My mother, long-suffering, developed a
splitting headache
in the withering damp heat of August 1987,
and I sprang fully-formed
from the intricacies of her mind.
No.
There was blood,
and my mother opened her mouth and
screamed--
the birth-howl,
the inverse of the shriek of the banshee
which my mother's mother's mother's mothers
brought to this country from Ireland,
the birth-howl which heralds life
though babies,
in the flush and blood and terror of their new present,
long for death.