There Is Not Enough Air to Say It All

In the opening paragraph of her book, MOTHERs, Rachel Zucker says, “In fifteen minutes I’ll need to stop writing and pick up my son.” I had never encountered that feeling of urgency, intermittence, desire to write—crushed within motherhood—said in such a straightforward, condensed manner: the words enact what they are saying, they move from time to son and traverse the writing in between.

In an hour I’ll need to stop writing and pick up my sons.

MOTHERs was one of the books that kept me company while writing my own recent book that just came out, Poem That Never Ends, which traces a sequence of mothers—my mother, my mother’s mother, myself as a mother. Someone said recently, “you have to write about what happened after your book,” and quoted a line from the last poem “Mama wakes up dead”—the same line that stood out to me while practicing reading for the book launch. My mother is alive, but was hospitalized during the pandemic for reasons unrelated to Covid. My mother, like her mother, has a hearing impairment, she reads lips: “she doesn’t need the sound, just the movement: the opening, the closing, the shaping of words.” Since the pandemic, lips have been covered with masks. Silence. Silence over silence. “Are you sure of what you are saying?” I asked the ICU nurse over the phone. “Yes, that’s what she said to me.” My brother and I sheltered in doubt for a while. How could our mother answer a question asked by a masked mouth, a mouth she could not see? What if she said yes to a question that required a no? There’s a space between mouth and mask, between nose and fabric, a space that shrinks as time passes. Did she mean no? Did we want a no? Was she strong enough to get to the ending of a No, the perfect circle of a hole in what appeared to be solid? A space, air grappling.

This is the first book that I have written in a language not my own. Language here generates both intimacy and remove. “Here language is a necessary distance,” I write. The book circles around my mother in a language my mother doesn’t speak. And still, it connects me with my mother’s experience. How moving between languages affects our hearing. How, for instance, when immersed in English, hearing becomes harder for me, and I help myself by “reading lips.”

I clench a pencil between my teeth. I practice before a reading. If it’s a wooden pencil, even better. The tips of your teeth stick in and saliva runs down. The way the pirates in a book I read to my sons carry their knives in their mouths, I carry a pencil, say mother, the most repeated word in my book and beyond. The space within and without the word, air grappling.