I don’t know how my mother
kept her head out of the oven.
Her pearly hair, a regal topiary,
skated like a moon, elliptically
in circuit of our lives. She kept
a satellite under her skin,
in her middle compartment.
I recognized its lambent glow.
A thousand years ago, lava
gushed from every pore of her.
Her whole self was a blister.
She tried to tell me
how love is a termite.
I didn’t listen.

Erica Miriam Fabri’s (she/her) first book, Dialect of a Skirt, was a finalist for the Paterson Poetry Prize. Her second book, Morphology, was the winner of the Jack McCarthy Book Prize. She has been widely published in magazines and anthologies and has worked as a writer and educator for Urban Word NYC, The New York Knicks, and Nickelodeon Television. She teaches writing for the City University of New York (CUNY). ericafabri.com