Mitochondrial Eve 11.20, and: Laura: Mitochondrial Eve
- Mitochondrial Eve 11.20, and: Laura: Mitochondrial Eve
Mitochondrial Eve 11.20
Somewhere buried in the dirt,is a common woman, a commonmother, with a common pelviscommonly made degenerateher common bones fossilized,we hope, that we may exhume,examine our commonalityand go unquestioning howcommon it is for a womanlike her to be uncoveredcarried to a museumand presented for herpeculiar. [End Page 287]
Laura: Mitochondrial Eve
According to science, grandmothershold the promise of two generations:her own child and the eggs ofher not yet grandchildren.
Which means that in the late monthof 1951, and the earliest months of 1952,you held my mother, who held me,if not as an idea then, as a fact
It wouldn't be the first time, mother ofmothers, you held a thought before flesh couldform it alive. You, poet laureate of my heart,gave me words before I knew sound
Every dream for us carefully winked,charted, and documented in notebooks,on the backs of envelopes, a graduation,a new job, the first of yet another generation
Every celebration, a newly minted song,every equation of our needs penciled andsolved. Every terror pressed out by thehallowed bend in your knees
What sliver of paper wouldhold our day of ghostly hearts?Which one of us will wave goodbye from ourearth porch as you sail away from us?
We hold to each other feeling forour flesh inheritance, our spirit [End Page 288] heirlooms, and come up wantingmore than the you in ourselves
According to science, grandmotherscarry the promise of two generationsholding and then, carefully, and firstlybreathing, pushing, letting go [End Page 289]
Bettina Judd is currently assistant professor in the Department of Gender, Women & Sexuality Studies at the University of Washington. Her poems and essays have appeared in Torch, The Offing, Meridians: feminism, race, transnationalism, and other journals and anthologies. Her collection of poems, Patient., tackles the history of medical experimentation on and display of Black women, and won Black Lawrence Press's Hudson Book Prize in 2013. She can be reached at inquire@bettinajudd.com.
