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    Pecking Order
    Pecking Order
    Pecking Order
    Ebook86 pages49 minutes

    Pecking Order

    By Nicole Homer

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    About this ebook

    Nicole Homer's first full-length poetry collection, Pecking Order, is an unflinching look at how race and gender politics play out in the domestic sphere. Homer challenges the notion of family by forcing the reader to examine how race, race performance, and colorism impact motherhood immediately and from generation to generation. In a world where race and color often determine treatment, the home should be sanctuary, but often is not. Homer's poems question the construction of racial identity and how familial love can both challenge and bolster that construction. Her poems range from the intimate details of motherhood to the universal experiences of parenting; the dynamics of multiracial families to parenting black children; and the ingrained social hierarchy which places the black mother at the bottom. Homer forces us to reckon with the truth that no one–not even the mother–is unbiased.
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherWrite Bloody Publishing
    Release dateApr 15, 2017
    ISBN9781949342109
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      Book preview

      Pecking Order - Nicole Homer

      Homer

      PECKING ORDER

      The Overlap

      Lottery

      Lithopedians and Flesh

      Conception

      Portrait of My Grammama on Her Grammama’s Lap, Neither of Them Smiling

      Townies

      Yes

      How I Became a Mother Contemplating Loss

      Why Didn’t You Just Go Look?

      The Woman Who Is Not the Nanny Answers at the Grocery Store Concerning the, Evidently, Mismatched Children in and around Her Cart

      But if You Are a White Boy, Then My Father Was a White Boy, Too

      I Have Counted Sixteen and a Half Dead Deer on My Ride Home from Work

      The Paper Trail

      Hunger

      Ease

      Things Only a Black Mother Can Prepare You For

      The Grandmother Says [The Mother Thinks]

      In Which I Use the DVR to Speak to the Paused Face of Michonne

      The Mother Offers Advice (Or, I Am Doing the Best I Can with What I Have)

      A Sister Remembers

      The Colorist

      Motherhood

      I Count One Deer, Route 537

      My Father Had Such Good Taste in Women

      Miss Celie

      Things I Want to Say to Rae Dawn Chong

      I Sit, Framed

      The Women in the Family

      Family Mythology

      Casual Racist

      Threshold

      The Children Speak:

      When I Had Children with a White Person

      //if you say it is

      I Wish I Was More Mothers

      THE OVERLAP

      Once a girl I love miscarried.

      I didn’t ask for details;

      here is all I need to know:

      she loved it

      and it died.

      I know, too, how the machine

      works its sticky magic.

      I have felt it unwork in me.

      These are the details you need:

      I didn’t want it

      and it died.

      You need to know this, too:

      I still think of it.

      Want and love are not the same word.

      When I was weeks into the making

      of a wanted thing

      there was a night

      when she felt the stab of the machine

      bucking

      and I felt, instead, a kick.

      LOTTERY

      I went to every prenatal appointment. I went to a specialist because of my age. Because of the C-section two years ago. Because the stress on the walls of the uterus. Because the scar. Because no one trusts a woman’s body. I put my feet in the stirrups. I took all the vitamins. I got enough sleep. I tried. I worked. But I had to work. I ate well. I don’t even like avocados but they kept saying good fat so I ate. And I talked to him. I listened to his heartbeat. I told him I loved him. And when he kicked, I laughed even if I winced first. And when he pressed his hand against my organs like he wasn’t going to stay there for another month or week, I didn’t press back. I rubbed his palm through my body and felt him relax. And I relaxed. And they said I couldn’t do a VBAC—no vaginal birth after cesarean for us, they said—but we knew better, him and me. We knew we could. And when it started to trickle out of me like the slow start of an ugly cry, I wasn’t scared. I pushed when they asked me to push. I breathed when they asked me to breathe. I screamed without asking anyone’s blessing. They handed him to me and he was at once and still my love. But. But he was as pale as the ghost of a black boy.

      LITHOPEDIANS AND FLESH

      A lithopedian is a stone baby; dead inside its mother, it calcifies.

      It was 1948.

      Her name is not important

      The war had been over for three years.

      This is what the history books will tell you,

      as though peace is a sudden thing:

      a light switch

      or a veil dropped over a country.

      The newspapers will not mention her—

      nothing about this thirty-two-year old woman

      or the kicking she harbored inside her.

      How it was a soft

      insistent tapping at first,

      its own war drum,

      how her hand circled

      her belly like a battleship

      or bird of prey

      a hand—a woman’s hand—casting a spell.

      No, they will only announce: PEACE!

      as though quiet is something every woman would want.

      The tapping was insistent

      until it wasn’t.

      When the doctors

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