My mother watches the doe birth her baby, watches
as she buries her head in the yard’s black soil
and labors alone. She imagines breathing in the scent
of dirt in a hospital room, the smell of forest floor
of beetles of loam of moss filling her lungs. She inhales,
swallows all the wildness—the mother deer’s flushed brow,
her rank scent, the fawn’s wet fur, the doe’s obsidian
eye—swallows them whole. She’s had her quarrels
with childbirth. When I was born in a whitewashed hospital,
my father not permitted to enter the room, she labored
for 23 hours—the bells of pain echoing all around. When
my brother came, fragile, too soon, she was told
not to let him cry, as though that was at all possible.
The anguish of it, the full animal-ache—to the marrow
of each bone; all that need in the night, the suckling fear
that kept her awake. Now, she keeps her eyes on the doe
and as if reteaching herself to be wild, as if reteaching herself
to be animal—she watches the birth. From an innermost
place, an earthen room, she lets it all back in—the brambles
at the foot of the hunkering oak, the galaxy of soil, all
the small songbirds tucking in, a dark green fist in her belly
unfurling. Above them, the miraculous stars, the way they fly
into the mouth of the new fawn as he pulls them in,
as he sucks the milky-way
all the way down.
–
Anya Kirshbaum is a queer poet and somatic therapist living in Seattle, Washington. Her work has appeared in The Comstock Review, Cirque, MER – Mom Egg Review, Crannóg, and Solstice Literary Magazine. She was a finalist for the New Millennium Writing Awards and was the recipient of the 2023 Banyan Poetry Prize.