Daughters

The novelist said drop daughter
        into your proposal and the whole
marketing team will be behind you

because daughter is synonymous 
        with love and sorrow, conflict 
and separation, age, impossible

desire. We laughed but I knew 
        it was true—all those stories 
about blood and bone, how we 

felt our way out of blind tunnels
        in the same way our mothers and
their mothers and their mothers before

them did, elbowing into a world we  
        are still demanding make space for us.