Poetry Archive

Lost Seed: An Abecedarian for Fatherless Daughters 

Lost Seed: An Abecedarian for Fatherless Daughters   


A man did not father us. The daughters of no man, sailing without
ballast, use mirrors like maps to match our faces to pattern-less shado
ws.
Chest stabbed by the dagger of absence—morphing us superhuman.
Daughters of no man invest an eternity praying for a stone’s heart to 
enliven—but these dead rocks pound love into no one. Knotted & lumped up,
fatherless daughters explore other options. Attracted to holes, we often marry
ghosts. My sister’s the wife of the wind now. Her first husband was a
hung solar eclipse. I’m convinced we birthed every demigod in existence. 
Invincible but it stings, having our nuclei pinched when we’re tortured and 
jinxed witnessing a father leave a shiny kiss on his baby girl’s forehead—
killed and reborn with this solstice, surviving by eating our tails  
like the serpent; grateful for the full stomach. It’s a prude and common
misconception that daughters of no man become rebels/ strippers/ or toxic/
never settle/ because of how seldom we meet our fathers—some are lucky 
or sometimes unlucky (16/ still a virgin /and he called me a slut). Our
pain isn’t always for pleasure—it’s the opposite. As mutated martyrs, giving 
quietly is our default superpower. Ripping the shirts off our backs/ 
ripping the skin/ gifting the bone and the marrow, never expecting a
single thing back—self/sacrifice like it’s normal because we’re indigenous 
to a world all-maternal, universal holders of wisdom & light, father made us
unequivocally humble. And we brave storms knowing we are the rainbows. 
Voyagers searching for one thing, conquer everything else on the way. Afraid,
we—lost seeds—grow in whatever dirt we land in, we’re proof that the 
X-chromosome is resilient. We do our best and break cycles with the
Y-chromosomes of our children. It is written; women will rebuild the city of
Zion in our Sacred Feminine image.  



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Filed under: Poetry Archive

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Anacaona Rocio Milagro is a poet born, raised, and still living in New York City, Washington Heights. She is the mother of Nirvana Sky and Zion. Her father is from the Dominican Republic and her mother is from St. Thomas, The Virgin Islands. Daughter of Oshun but adopted by Yemaya. She earned an MFA in Poetry at NYU’s Low Residency program in Paris and an MPH at Columbia University. She earned a BA in Social Anthropology and Journalism/Creative Writing with a minor in Art from Baruch College. Her poems have been published in The BreakBeat Poets Anthology, Narrative Magazine, and LitHub, to name a few.