Stolen Heirloom
The morning has not yet broken.
All the lucky children in
New York City sleep soundly
while the unlucky lay wide awake
For dinner they ate their anger,
it was all their parents could offer
but one can’t sleep with a bellyache.
I light a candle for them
and sit still until the finches wake
When the son finally cracks like outrage
I dip a croissant into coffee
and study the strangeness of my hands
they are replicas of my mother’s-
boney, tired, and longing, but mine
are masked with rings and polish
herein lies our differentiating quality-
luck: a recessive gene of sorts and
the thing I stole from my mother
Tykhe, the goddess of fortune
is depicted balancing on a ball
a symbol for the volatile nature of luck
its capacity to roll in any which direction
“Careful,” She seems to warn,
“one uncalculated movement and
you’ll be plummeting through the sky.”
My mother is a fatherless Icarus
her wings are made of worries
Is that the way the story goes?
On the other side of the border
my mother studies her empty hands
while she waits for mourning to dawn
and she does not think of me.
By Grecia Espinoza
Biography
Grecia Espinoza is a Brooklyn based poet. She moved to New York to start her M.A. in English and American Literature at New York University. Her writing is inspired, almost paradoxically, by the language of confessional and Black Arts poetry both of which have been the center of her research. Aside from her studies, she writes for a women’s lifestyle magazine called H3R. She’s currently working on a poetry collection that she hopes to finish by the end of the year.