By. Olivia Kingery
Maybe a gracious girl, a balanced boy, just know I love you
in a space of my heart where I can’t see. There are mountains
and a pond and maybe you are at the bottom but I cannot swim
this land. I do not know its language.
You see, in a past life
where I wore the same face, I died during childbirth. I remember
white gown, red blood stain of a life taken for another. I am not selfish,
I promise. It’s just, as an atheist in a dying world, there is no hope
for bringing a small ball of sun, which I know you would be,
into the chaos already on fire.
I am already on fire. If I can’t keep my head
afloat, how could I teach you to do the same?
I suppose this could be written
to the agony of feeling out casted from my family for being the only girl,
empty womb, never opening my womb to the world; to my brother’s wives
who quickly replaced me as the women my family always wanted,
always needed. I want to keep part of me private.
You see, I once dreamt
I was in a battlefield, southern Germany when the hate poured through hills
of charred bodies, and I was pregnant, you remember this, running through bodies
to get to a place I knew was safe for you, and before the pushing and the screaming,
before the moment of you in my arms, I woke. And I’m sorry you’ll never wake
but I’ll save you the pain: I love you more than a first breath of air, all the way down
to the pond of my heart where sturgeons are feasting on overturned lily pads.
You see, the engine won’t start, and by engine I mean
the maternal instinct to want to create and push and send off a piece of me
into the world. This decaying world, Sturgeons belly up, lily pads
scorched, mountains of grief, the rivers dammed. This burning cathedral
in which I believe in, in which I am still a child, in which I am indebted.
With a hand over my womb and the ground shaking beneath my feet,
I must muster the courage to give birth to myself, strip myself of time
and age and dive into the pond – I hope to find you there.