Winner Bernice Kilduff Whte & John J. White Creative Writing Prize for Rose Hill Seniors
Published: April 22, 2010

Last night: a dream in which

I was pregnant and mother

had hair long and like the spun

wheat caught in grainy polaroids, where

she smiles with yellow curls in her

teeth and eyelashes that arch

like a moon mostly dead.

Some proof

she was me once.

The life inside me stirred

the same way as a child I furled

myself like a map into my mother’s arms–

the ends of the world–and sheathed

my hands within her hands.

So it moved, as only dreams can recall,

touching in me

a woman

I had not known.