 So several of the poems in Cleave are in conversation with social psychologist Harry Harlow, who was famous for his studies on attachment and relationships between caregivers and infants. He did this work primarily with resource monkeys, most famously taking them away from their mothers and presenting them with two surrogate options, one made of cloth and one made of wire. So I'm going to start by reading a few poems that appear scattered throughout the first section of the book that use this idea of Harlow surrogate mothers in order to imagine different forms of mothers from the perspective of the adoptee. It starts with an epigraph, which is a quote from Harlow's research paper called The Nature of Love. The surrogate was made from a block of wood covered with sponge rubber and sheathed in tanned cotton and terry cloth. A light bulb behind her radiated heat. The result was a mother, soft, warm and tender. A mother with infinite patience. A mother available 24 hours a day. A mother that never scolded her infant and never struck or bit her baby in anger. Mother of ghost. Whether of wire or terry cloth, there will always be mother. Mine was made of ghost. Every move is one step away from her. I try to backtrack, lose myself in maps. I tell myself, tread nimbly. Every step is a newborn shadow. Bodies fracturing light. Mother without a face. She looks in the mirror. I wonder what creases we share. I wonder how long her hair is. I wonder if she chews on the inside of her mouth until the skin is chafed pulp. If she sucks her teeth when it rains. I wonder if she clings to heat like a monkey to cloth. My nose capsizes. An upside down question mark. I pull and pull. I stretch short. Foster mother. The first time I belonged to a woman. My body a fresh bulb broken off at the root. She kept me for six months. Watch spit bubble from my pursed lips. I wonder if she ever claimed me. If she rocked me to sleep on her chest. If she wiped my mouth gently saying, there you go. There you are. The first time I belonged to a woman. My body a fresh bulb broken off at the root. Dreams of motherhood. Wire barbed with fragments of love or tender cloth that never scolds, never strikes, never bites. The mothers I find like copper coins, heads face up. The ones I collect because of their tenderness. The nature of a light radiating heat. The mother. I'm waiting for someone to claim her. What is the opposite of mother? And throughout the book, I have a series of poems that I call my dictionary poems. That are, that wherein I borrow language from the Oxford English dictionary entries on, on different words. So this poem. Browsing which from the entry on migrant. And I think as an adoptee. As an adoptee of an immigrant for most of my childhood, I think growing up in a predominantly white space. In a white family, you know, I, I tried as best as I could to erase that. That painful challenging aspect of my, of my origin. And it's only within the last few years that I really started to embrace the fact that I, my own immigrant story, even if it is different than other peoples that I originated in another country and traveled here. It's called migrant and it's written in solidarity around the, the diverse experiences of immigrants around the world. Migrant. Of an animal, especially a bird. A wandering species, whom no sees nor places limit. A seed who survives despite the depths of hard winter. A bird who has been living, staring her band from icy seas to warmer strands. To find the usual watering places, despite the gauze of death that shrouds our eyes is a breath taking feet. Do you ever wonder why we felt like happy birds, brushing our feathers on the tips of leaves. How we lifted our toes from one sand bank and landed. Finger tips first on another. And then we saw the sun and tiny creatures of flower and blade and sod between our budding fists. From an origin of buried seeds emerge these many banded dagger wings. We of the sky, the dirt and the sea, we the seven leap booters and the little by littlers, we trans migrated souls will prevail. We will carry ourselves into the realms of light.