I was born with clay in my hands,
oil paint beneath my fingernails,
my cradle rocked by a lullaby of tenor sax
and the scratch of a pencil on cheap lined paper.
At breakfast, someone recited Neruda
over toast slicked with jam.
By dusk, a guitar moaned from the porch
while my father’s drawings drifted like leaves across the floor.
My mother hummed to the ghost of her grandmother,
who danced barefoot through kitchens long vanished,
flour-dusted and bright with song.
We carried their stories in coffee mugs,
in the battered suitcases of our marrow.
Sometimes I wondered if I was chosen
or simply caught by a net woven before I arrived—
each thread a sonata, a sonnet, a tender chord
spun by ancestors who stitched music into their skin.
Evenings we gathered by lamplight,
each voice a different timber on the loom:
my aunt with her watercolors of ruined chapels,
my uncles coaxing folk tunes from guitars,
and me, wrestling small gods into poems,
scribbling down the hush of dusk.
To carry a mousa is to inherit
both the burden and the balm—
to shoulder her lantern through tangled bramble,
to follow her even when she leads
through doorways of grief or wonder.
She is the breath before the bow touches string,
the silence that demands to be filled,
the blood-ink of our lineage
trickling from wrist to page,
generation after generation
writing ourselves alive.
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Renee Mies lives in the Chicago suburbs. She is a board-certified patient advocate and hobby poetess. Her poems have appeared in Prosetrics literary magazine, Halfway Down the Stairs literary magazine and Cathexis Northwest Press. Upcoming works can be seen in The Wild Umbrella, Beyond Words Magazine and Fjords Review. In her free time, she enjoys hiking, camping and keeping up with her husband and four children.
© 2025, Renee Mies
Halfway Down the Stairs 