[Lyric] For My Mama (Julia Hannafin)

And suddenly, it was not the sum of her parts but
          one part that became what
defined a torso, a chest, the flesh
          of a woman or a mother,

or pauses hidden in bone marrow,
          we all revolved around her diagnosis
like the planets around the sun,
          not for light or life
but for something that would explain
          how we should gather
our limbs, in sync with the precisely
          timed grief of treatments
“working”, and present them --

as tools or sacrifices for the course
          of actions to eat away at,
it became necessary to
          breathe out our selfishness
in the air we could take
          for ourselves, pump youth
down into the pores at the
          very surface of our fingertips
and renounce them as only
          one more thing that used to be
our own