the birth mother's red bath for courage
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With spoiled milk seeping
from its many small brown mouths, my body twitched loose the dead skin snaked around it, dripped runes in the doorway, heaved bullet after bullet into the tub—but did not die. There are claw marks & hot grease stains where things came through. Signature survival signs etched around my belly— at the hinge, in the crevices. All of it evidence: I did give birth to something. There was a killing here— of a kind. Something is lost now, forced from a room in me. Something is stifled in this body; I have become a deconstructed basket of rose-colored towels singing on the hospital’s floor. Some nights, I think this body must still be calling out to the child that tore through it or trying to forgive itself for giving itself over to the strange & inconvenient truth that not all mothers—are mothers. Some mothers are war—an enemy of their own desires. Some mothers are graveyards—a field of want buried beneath other fields of want. Some nights, I think this body must still be praying to a god that has long since slithered away. |
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Faylita Hicks (pronouns: she/her/they) is a black queer writer and editor of Borderlands: Texas Poetry Review. She was a finalist in the 2018 PEN American Writing for Justice Fellowship and Palette Poerty’s 2019 Spotlight Award. Her debut book, HoodWitch, is forthcoming October 2019 with Acre Books. Her poetry and essays have appeared in Slate, Huffington Post, the Texas Observer, POETRY Magazine, Kweli Journal, The Rumpus, The Cincinnati Review, Tahoma Literary Review, Prairie Schooner, Lunch Ticket, and others. She received her MFA from Sierra Nevada College’s low-residency program and lives in San Marcos, Texas. She is at work on a memoir.
Jia Sung is an artist and educator, born in Minnesota, bred in Singapore, now based in Brooklyn, and received a BFA from RISD in 2015. She is currently a 2018-2019 Smack Mellon Studio Artist and Van Lier Fellow, and an art director at Guernica. Her paintings and artist books have been exhibited across North America, including the Knockdown Center, RISD Museum, Wave Hill, EFA Project Space, Lincoln Center, Yale University, and MOMA PS1, and in publications including Hyperallergic, Jacobin Magazine, Asian American Writers’ Workshop, and The Guardian.