Once, there was a child hemorrhaging light.
The blue song of her brain—
an early maggot, writhing.
Her mother, a jealous newlywed,
with looking-glass hands & a tub of bleach,
thieved & thieved until the child
became a quiet room. A silence
born of interrogated flesh.
Girl is the worst season.
Mother, no guarantee.
No clothes. No meat. No heavy tit
wrecked with milk. So the blue song
became a dirge, then the dirge
became a girl.

The poem is about how a mother is hurting the child emotionally through her actions. I know the author was abused by her mother during her childhood, and this poem may be a reflection of her childhood and how she felt during that time. When I first read the poem, I didn’t know what some of the vocabulary words meant, such as hemorrhaging and dirge. 

The line “Once, there was a child hemorrhaging light” suggests that there was a child full of life and potential, signified by light. However, the word “hemorrhaging” suggests that she is losing this light quickly, or that the child is losing her potential and joy quickly. The poem then expands on why she is losing this light, which is because of her mother. 

“The blue song in her head” suggests that the thoughts inside the child’s head are being described as a “blue song”. Referencing “blue song” may reference to the thought’s being one of sadness, often due to problems with love and oppression. This may once again reference how the child is experiencing sadness due to her lack of love from her mother. Or it may just symbolize a child’s dreams. The next line “an early maggot, writhing.” expands on the previous line as seen from the dash, which may mean the child’s thoughts are slowly decaying and deteriorating, or filled with pain, due to the continued actions of the mother. 

The author also uses a lot of dark and gross sounding words, cacophony words, such as maggot, wrecked, and flesh. These words also emphasize a mother’s neglect of the child because the words create harsh sounds. 

I think the purpose of the lines “Girl is the worst season. Mother, no guarantee.”  is to tell the reader that being a girl is a hardship itself, like being a girl is the worst. And that her mother is not helpful when it comes to these struggles. Like, my mother, I can’t guarantee she will help me. 

The lines “No clothes. No meat. No heavy tit wrecked with milk.” expand on the previous lines on the things that her mother fails to do for the child. And the frequent pauses between the lines emphasize these failures, making it more dramatic. Like, if she had put it in a continuous single line “No clothes, meat, and heavy tit wrecked with milk”, it doesn’t have as much of a dramatic effect. 

The poem also follows a flow that is unpredictable, and I think that is meant to parallel her trauma. Like, there is no clear beginning or ending in some of the sentences, which is a way how some people with trauma feel. Or, it may be to parallel a child’s chaotic and unstable mind. Because children depend on their parents to take care of them, and having to deal with this kind of stuff will lead a child to feel overwhelmed and fragmented, kinda like the poem structure. 

The author references “blue song” once again at the end of the poem. Between the sadness and the child’s dream reference, it may symbolize a child’s dream rather than symbolizing her sadness. I think that because in continuation to that phrase, the author writes “became a dirge”, in which dirge is a mournful song, often referenced to grief and death. I think referencing “So the blue song became a dirge” may mean that the child’s happy and vibrant thoughts slowly turned to pain and grief due to the actions of her mother. The last line “became a girl” shows how her mother’s actions have heavily impacted who she is as an individual because the entire phrase is “So the blue song became a dirge, then the dirge became a girl.”, meaning that the once happy child turned sad, which then became a girl. This references that the child will carry the weight of their mother’s actions for a long period of time, because she looked up to the mother as a child with no sense of the world.