FIRST GENERATION 

Jessica Hicks

It isn’t that Grandma

didn’t like ee cummings.

He just didn’t speak for her.

Though she grew up only

a few miles from his birthplace,

her soul came unfurnished,

a blank slate for the State.

We had to work.

We had no use

for poems, she said

as she hummed

her always song

from somewhere long ago

and cooked cabbage

with salt pork

like her mother

and her mother

and her mother.

It skips a generation,

she told me

of her sadness,

her strangeness,

her self-harm,

the emptiness left

by assimilation

by time spent in

the pot you melt in.

And now I hum

her always song

from somewhere long ago.

When Jessica Hicks is not writing, she’s parenting her three teenagers, working as a professional aide in the local high school, reading everything she can get her hands on, and engaging in activism towards “radical compassion and inclusion”. She also does a lot of making, and she has started composing music in the last couple of years as well. She is a five-year cancer survivor-the odds of her survival weren't great-and, ever since the cancer, she has been living her promise to use these “bonus years” to make as much good as she can.