It Has Always Been

The day beginning outside an apartment window.
A hummingbird flittering to a forgotten
plant on a balcony. The mushroom

growing out from soil held in a broken
piece of pottery. It has always been
my mother’s fault. The universe grew her body,

then my nerves, my bones, my skin,
so I have kept her whispers in the secret pockets
of weathered jackets and tattered handbags.

Why am I here? At one moment on a bed.
At another sitting in a chair or walking down stairs.
Are we together or apart? Which universe

grows the Spanish vowels sounding through a soft sea?
I come from the wings of a migratory
bird sailing the Earth’s magnetic field.

I am soil that has been lost. I am a stalk of mint
overgrown in a garden. I am the creek outside.
Follow the path down toward water

and look up to the sky. It is blue.
Everywhere on this Earth. Do you see
how we turn on this planet? Can you feel

the rush as we rotate round the sun? Is it true
that the universe collapses or are we expanding
so much that we will stretch into infinity?

My mother loves the trees, the redwoods,
the Monterey Pines, the eucalyptus, the old live oaks
with their bristle leaves that scratch and pinch.

Here, ivy grows, cacti expand into their pots, the hydrangea
continues to bloom blue each spring.
I do not remember my own birth nor the sound

of my mother’s heartbeat. What is before then?
I existed as a star in a galaxy,
then I sailed the waves of gravity into her body.

I grew from a little fish to a wailing girl baby
with sharp fingernails and a toothless grin,
then I entered this world of Spanish gendered

endings where el femenino turns half of the language
into menstrual blood. Why do letters fall into whispers
and ride a faint breeze through the pines?

My mother’s secrets. Here, in the trees. They grow. The universe.
The universe grows my mother’s body.
Can I say I come from her?