Ancestress
by
Jenna Le
Jenna Le
Jenna Le is the author of Six Rivers (NYQ Books, 2011), which was a Small Press Poetry Bestseller. Her poetry, fiction, essays, book criticism, and translations have appeared or are forthcoming in Barrow Street, Bellevue Literary Review, Massachusetts Review, Measure, Pleiades, and 32 Poems.
This lady was so devout,
her hair remained
lush and black as
squirted squid ink
until age eighty-three,
and when her spinster
daughter came to tidy
after the funeral,
recalling her mother's
wrinkled snail-face,
she half-expected
to see a sloughed cobra skin
curled on the bed she died in.
But no: not even
a smudge of sweat.
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