This week’s poem, Sass Borodkin’s “Inquiring Minds: Mother’s Edition,” offers a candid, searching meditation on a parent-child relationship. I love this poem’s repetition of simple words – “chin,” “love” and “cup” – as if echoing a nursery rhyme, in poignant contrast with the ache that drives it.

Borodkin is a community organizer, visual artist and poet whose work has been featured multiple times by Port Veritas and the Poetry Express program of the Maine Humanities Council. Sass is also a queer, nonbinary grandparent who is a survivor of chronic homelessness and a lifetime of poverty. The work Sass is most passionate about focuses on creating networks for heart-based relationship building, mutual aid and peer support, and efforts that help dismantle structures of oppression.

Inquiring Minds: Mothers Edition
By Sass Borodkin

I didn’t know I couldn’t
love the trauma
out of you

Your wrinkled fingers
cupping your tea,
never my chin

What’s it like?
To feel the chin cup?
To have the love
loved into you
by a chin cupper?

Megan Grumbling is a poet and writer who lives in Portland. Deep Water: Maine Poems is produced in collaboration with the Maine Writers & Publishers Alliance. “Inquiring Minds: Mothers Edition,” copyright 2021 by Sass Borodkin, appears by permission of the author.