Each day at 8am, my mother the lunch lady works
the assembly line of newly made meals Each a
stamp of mass, scratched from the unlimited land of
heather and sunflower risings
She reaches home at 3, after a day of patriarchy whose offspring
depend on her, to be coddled, each, her presumed favorite. A maid
at school. Her face erased from her colored marked body universally
misseen, misnamed.
After school, I watch her, in her bedroom, removing her school clothes, collecting her uniforms for
the wash. Her handkerchief shaped like a doily on her uniform’s lapel, with the name Dot inside. I
don’t know her as this woman, a blackwoman whose birth is tied up in her labor. She labors for the
small coins, to use her blackbody as surrogate for
elevated white women, who insist she nourish what their whiteness has wrought. Manage their
childish fears, miss anne said, be hattie, be the wind, be mammy for 8hours while they are in
preparation for future domination. They have the power my mother could not imagine. At home
Dot is taking what is not really quiet time, but in the slimmest of single moments, within the
enclosing generational chasm of servitude and place, in these moments she belongs to no-
one. She says it is her nerves; she needs (“unrespected” moments) to fight for her life in a life, where
she is owned by the state, her husband, her daughters, the church, the community, who says that she
is the very nice lady with a smile who exists to serve lunch at this unintegrated school. The lunch
lady with cancer, cancer that silenced, sunk her until she retreated with her voice. The labor, the
black female body she couldn’t corral, but succumbed, when home meant gone.
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Contributor Notes
Cynthia Parker-Ohene is a graduate of the MFA program at the Saint Mary’s College of California where she was the Chester Aaron Scholar for Excellence in Creative Writing. She is a Tin House Summer Writer’s Conference, alum, awarded the Pittman Scholarship from Juniper at the University of Massachusetts-Amherst, an awardee at the Vermont College of Fine Arts, a Callaloo Fellow and Hurston/Wright Fellow, among others others . Her poems have appeared in Crab Orchard Review, Black Nature: Four Centuries of African American Nature Poetry, The Ringing Ear: Black Poets Lean South, and Yellow Medicine Review, and others. She is a Pushcart Nominee, and the winner of the 2017 chapbook prize for Drapetomania published in 2017 by Backbone Press.
