"She is of the frozen people"

Carmen Calatayud on her poem, "Mother's Hips"

"Mother's Hips" by Carmen Calatayud may be a compact poem--nine two-line stanzas and a "longer" one that stretches to three lines--but packed into it is a multi-generational legacy of pain and trauma.

Specifically, Calatayud said, it's "a surreal snapshot of how [my mother] was always dying during her life, in one way or another."

To put her mother's prol…