Let us not strike each other, not even with a blade of grass.
What about the woman whose body is solid as a tree trunk,
her old hands the branches that slap the tops and sides of city buses?
She hits her granddaughter once. Again. Another time.
The old woman doesn't scream anymore,
only whips her limbs about the girl's face, the soft parts of her ears,
the girl's dumb ears now turning the same color as her purple-brown lips.
The heart is so weak.
It doesn't matter if the beats skip
or rise to the soft space below the throat.
I dream of a baby left in a shopping cart under a box of cereal.
Even when he clings to me, I hesitate before his mother.
I am the weakest. I am the leaf that falls when there is no breeze.
Ladam Osman
is originally from Somalia. She received her M.F.A. as a Michener Fellow from the University of Texas at Austin. Her work has appeared or is forthcoming in American Life in Poetry, Black Renaissance Noire, The Feminist Wire, Kweli, MELUS, Narrative, Poet Lore, and ROAR Magazine. She works as a teaching artist in Chicago where she lives with her husband, photographer Greg Broseus.