Momcomesfirst.24.06.21.brianna.beach.give.me.a.... Jun 2026

"I used to feel guilty taking time for myself," Brianna says. "But I realized that if I didn't prioritize my own needs, I'd burn out and become a less effective parent. Now, I make sure to schedule time for myself each day, whether it's a walk on the beach or a yoga class."

Thus, the poem’s title enacts a , positioning maternal experience as the primary temporal axis. MomComesFirst.24.06.21.Brianna.Beach.Give.Me.A....

Feminist literary criticism has long highlighted the “maternal metaphor” as a site of both empowerment and constraint (Haraway, 1988; Grosz, 1994). Recent scholarship expands this discussion to digital realms, where the mother figure can be encoded as a “meta‑author” (Sullivan, 2021). Baker and McCarthy (2019) argue that contemporary poetry increasingly foregrounds “maternal primacy” through temporal inversion—placing the mother’s experience before the child’s narrative arc. MomComesFirst explicitly enacts this inversion via its title: the maternal declaration precedes any personal identifier or location. "I used to feel guilty taking time for myself," Brianna says

Moreover, the poem exemplifies Baker & McCarthy’s (2019) model of maternal primacy through . By foregrounding “Mom” before any personal identifier, the poem asserts a matriarchal chronotopic schema , challenging patriarchal narratives that traditionally position the child’s experience as the primary referent. An Interdisciplinary Examination of Maternal Primacy

An Interdisciplinary Examination of Maternal Primacy, Temporal Displacement, and Spatial Narrative in Contemporary Digital Poetry