My name is Paudriga Tuma and I have a vivid memory when I was a teenager maybe 16 or 17.

My father came into the kitchen and you know our relationship was tense at the time. He was so hungry, must have had a complete blood sugar drop or something and he grabbed some bread and ate it like a starving man.

And I remember noticing his hunger and being shocked out of whatever battle we were caught in

and just seeing him for his hunger and I went and wrote a poem about it because I didn't know

what to do with seeing his need so clearly in front of me.

The coup by Valencia Robin.

My mother in all her armor which so rarely came off,

her laws, her decrees, her look that said,

don't ask me for anything,

before I could ask for anything

that roared off with her head when I asked anyway. Thus once in a rare show of defiance I said

then I want to call my father and even now I can't believe the words came out of my mouth. My father, a man my

mother had never acknowledged whose absence was treated no differently in our house than, say, not having

a cat or washer and dryer. She looked terrified,

like a dictator threatened with a coup,

like a lonely despot betrayed by her most trusted servant, like a single mother, catching three buses to work, no idea how she

could be the bad guy. This poem, The coup comes from comes from Valencia Robbins' book,

which is called Ridiculous Light,

and the book is dedicated to our mother.

And so this poem feels like it comes with a particular weight.

The dedication to the mother at the start of the book sets the tone of the relationship up in a particular way and then as a life is narrated and these feel like very autobiographical poems throughout the book, Lyric Poems, narrative poems.

This poem, The Coo, sits there with heavy language.

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