Listening to the Audiobook of The Bluest Eye

i am sitting hands-on-knees
upturned the voice of Toni Morrison

Herself is laying words like pearls
in palms – fists behind my ears

and heels. mama has fingers
one-and-two on temple aimed

up, parting question
from conclusion as they slide

down sides of the rental car.
brother is watching hills give way

beneath the milky windows,
humming and groaning as they sink

in solemned ears of green.
the cigarette smell hangs stale

and caught in nets of deep brown
woven scenes that lift my eyes

that are green-not-blue, I grip
my seatbelt like a shield.

Maya Renaud-Levine is a senior at Beacon High School, born and raised in Brooklyn, New York. She has a passion for podcasts, politics, singing, and playing the piano, and will never turn down a good crime novel. Her poetry is published or forthcoming in The WEIGHT Journal, Idle Ink, Eunoia Review, Blue Marble Review, Girls Right the World, Recenter Press, and Truant Lit, and she is a national winner of the American High School Poets’ JUST POETRY!!! the National Poetry Quarterly.