For Lula (My Grandmother)
By Dasha Hill
soot dirt,
citing black geographies,
the thin soles of her literacy
pressed into red clay earth.
the taste of mud in her speech
clung to the root of her tongue,
each word carrying the weight of where she’d been.
she wrote with slate fingertips,
graphite ghosts on paper,
her voice steady as weathered soil,
each word seeded with remembering.
i carry her grit,
her quiet signifier,
the thin soles, the mud, the soot.
her language hums beneath my tongue,
whispering what she could not finish.