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Show Me a Mother

Did you look at me before or after / you tore the cord? Did you look at all?

  • Tiana Nobile
  • Candice Evers
  • August 2023
Artwork by Candice Evers
  • Poem
  • Protest

Image of the poem "Show Me a Mother" by Tiana Nobile. Reads:

"You rinsed off your distress in the shower
as your placenta peeled from the edge of your body.
A pool of blood and mucus circling the drain.

After the first day of labor, I cradle my distress
in the bathtub, mooing on all fours.
Palms, knees, and toes submerged in water. 

You: twenty and alone. Me: wet and wailing.
If a mother cries out and no one is around to hear it –

On the third day of labor, they say, 
We can see the head. There’s so much hair.

I, too, had hair at birth.
I know because someone wrote they shaved it off.

If a baby cries out –

Hearing Jun scream across the cold white room,
a primal urge rises from my throat.

When you returned, and I was gone,
did you wonder if it was all a dream?

Tell her to stop shaking.
Even the strongest anesthesia cannot contain
my body’s desire to see him.

Show me a mother after she saw her baby.

When Jun emerges, his body is covered in lanugo
like a little bear, and there is meconium under his nails,
black as dirt. The doctors call it          
of descent.               harvest.
Did you look at me before or after
you tore the cord? Did you look at all?

In the photograph, I press my cheek
against his cheek. I cup his soft skull in my palm.

Until there was a baby, there was grief.

You tell me your stomach aches every October,
my birth month. The body remembers distress, 
an unrelenting ghost.

At night the he howls like he is a wolf,
and I am the cave. He is the crest, and I am the wave."
  • adoption birth korea labor motherhood separation transnational adoption

Tiana Nobile

Tiana Nobile 문영신 is the author of Cleave (Hub City Press, 2021). She is a Korean American adoptee, Kundiman fellow, and recipient of a Rona Jaffe Foundation Writer's Award. Her writing has appeared in Poetry Northwest, The New Republic, Guernica, and Southern Cultures, among others. A founding member of The Starlings Collective, she lives with her family in New Orleans, Louisiana. For more, visit www.tiananobile.com.

Candice Evers

I’m Candice Evers, a St. Louis-based illustrator with an MFA in Illustration and Visual Culture from Washington University in St. Louis and a graduate of Wellesley College. I live with my two smedium-sized dogs, Indy (pictured left) and Junie B.

‹Also in this Issue›
  • Essay
Light Multiplies

Seema Reza , Candice Evers

The beginning of language: love crossing space. Language is taught. Sound is known. 

  • Intervention
  • Poem
Show Me a Mother

Tiana Nobile , Candice Evers

The body remembers distress, an unrelenting ghost.

  • Protest
Author Photo Credit Yekaterina Gyadu
  • Interview
Aracelis Girmay: On the Subterranean Energies of Togetherness

Cynthia Dewi Oka , aracelis girmay

I see what is at stake. I witness the slow and quick squandering of our children. I am complicit in it as I work to reject it. I reject it. 

  • Intervention

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