Show Me a Mother

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

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."

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.

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