Miscarriage Ghazal
It feels as if we’ve come from empty, the portal is a mother.
The dark of the cosmos grant us breath, the origin’s mother.
The babies before the babies before earth’s beginning suckled
stardust, shaped themselves of clay, resisting hands of a mother.
The unborn are Gods, born outside of the mind, the skin, the womb.
The most mortal of us nurture their leaving, still—forever mothers.
They cry with us, laugh our lungs free from grieving their going.
They watch us, hold us, soothe us, carry our heavy, becoming our mothers.
The desires stay swallowed, pressed against the soft spot of the cheek
tend to the body, test the blood, wait and wait, wonder how to mother.
The body is a mystery, no, the miracle cannot be fathomed,
there are no answers for the way the spirits guide us to mother.
There was once a baby blossoming my womb alive, she called me
her Mother, drank of me, loved of me, she left me, a mother.
Portal
penetration can edge the baby through.
induce. the earth is already hungry for it.
breasts a tender bite. ankles swallowing the
salt of sea. buoyed feet under blankets, a
harbor of a vessel. the head resting heavily
against the pelvis, they call it lightening.
quickening the precipice. the body heaves
from the weight of desire. the opening
wants to come open, wild gaping. bewitching
eclipse. celestial gateway—yearning
for a flickering in the dark.
Postpartum Letter to Phillis Wheatley-Peters #2
It is surreal how the rupturing is immortal. The way bodies break apart something furious. The way children climb their way in and through us. Isn’t it strange to be a portal? Isn’t it strange to know your children have been waiting for you long before you knew of them? Birth carries its own cosmic abilities. And even when the birth doesn’t happen, the beings follow like ghosts. I know you know the losses. How they detach you from your very body. The way being taken away from a homeland might, yet different because the taking makes you wonder if you were ever alive. If you were alive enough to make something else alive. I want you to know that I know what it feels like to miscarry, write a poem about it, and bury all the evidence. They call this time of your life, the lost years. Meaning there was a time you were swallowed up by grief. And it is in grief that I’ve learned there is no reconciling. In grief I’ve learned that a body is only a body and that there is something hopeless about being a person. Hopeless enough to question God. And you know this questioning well, even when you wrote poems about an acceptable God. A friend once told me they wanted to have children because there are Black people in the future. You must have known this too. You wrote so much of divinity; you must have seen your own imminence. You must have seen something abundant. The babies, the poetry. The babies, the poetry. In darkness you were birthing, futures forever raveling.
The Daughter Becomes Her Mother’s Body
Today, I am her sickled spine
yearning for earth, drawn to descent.
Gravity grounds this sadness to latch
its stubborn feet into rising mornings.
Before school, I’d watch my mother rest
against the burgeoning sun.
I’d ready myself for the walk alone
as if I’ve come from nowhere.
I wonder if her bed felt like mine,
the edges reaching over. Did she
wait on this cliff, readying to
swim the waters before the swallowing?
I take 10mg of Citalopram each morning.
My mother smokes a cigarette.
We both have our ways.
In the beginning, we lived in habitual dark
except I was my mother’s orb brewing.
Could this have been the place
where we were woven?
The weathered soil of lineage
doing its best to yield?
I am ruptured harvest.
The flood of the day
invites me into tomorrow.
There she is
a waking dream.
Gathering her bones
to ache forth through existence.
The sky bellows the tide
to guide these bodies.
The waves sing us through.
Upon Having Survived Your Birth
Before bloody tearing
became harrowed opening
an unrelenting scream signaled
life and the possibility of my own death
dangled its boundless mysteries
in and through me
while I pushed the eclipse
of your head stubborn in how it hid
from us, the breath I couldn’t catch
the back labor wrecking
the midwife’s hand in mine,
your father’s pressed against
my back, the body an eruption
unfathomable pain
the quiet of hospital socks
kissing linoleum shuffling
through the waiting
the swelling, the water
that rose, You lived
in the surf of me
the pain, again a vicious wave
the self severed
who can stay the same
after an end and a beginning
make love to each other
the descent insists on existing
that is nothing short of a miracle
this same miracle something
my mother witnessed
even when it conjured
a divine grief for the self
I know she lost
just like I have
and two ghosts
find each other
just as You are
arriving in the liminal space
between ground and ground
breathing in this imperfect earth
your newness so glaring
I can’t help
but look
Postpartum Letter to Phillis Wheatley-Peters #1
I want to know your name. The God-given one. I want to know if your teeth look like my grandmother’s. I want to know the way your mouth curves amid joy. I want to know what joy feels like in bondage. I want to know if that is possible. Tell me about possibility. Tell me how you knew how to carry the brilliance of your own life. Tell me the way the hair on your skin rises during a New England winter. Tell me how you survived being a Black girl in New England. Is it the same way I survived being a Black girl in New England? Isn’t it true that Black girls can survive the unimaginable? When will others stop forcing Black girls to survive the unimaginable? My therapist tells me that in raising my son, I am reparenting myself. There is something about mothering that breaks the capacity of time. Which is how I know you must have been mothering your young self as you were brought across The Atlantic. Was it watching yourself from another dimension that made you survive? I don’t know the true story, yet I know it is possible that a version of yourself kept your own self safe, long before someone thought purchasing you would. There is something about trauma that forces us to infinitely save ourselves. It is a transcendent power, this saving, even when the body has died. Phillis, did you know you live in and against time? That what made you write yourself alive is still breathing, breathing, breathing?
Portrait of a Mother Before Sunrise
My mother is Black
under the eyes in
twilight. Her mind
readies for midnight
ventures. The sleeping
hours have always been
her time away.
Us quiet children tucked
among the safety of night.
The hours, slow, and
swallowing, rock her
awake. Her feet
glide across the floor.
Our home resists the
pressure of her weight.
Her thinking begetting
unrest. How many
nights does she wait
for morning to yawn
into waking? Her eyes
open the entire time.
How heavy the body
rejecting rest fills
the lull of quiet. Fills
the worry to brim, stewing
slumber away—how all the
fear the body holds
endures in restless
weariness.