Lessons

A Golden Shovel after Lucille Clifton

After twenty-two hours in labor with minimal dilation, my mother

suggested we rethink the natural birth plan. She worried I

would be too tired to push when it came time. Have

you ever been ashamed by the magnitude of your own relief? I managed

to look at her face for the first time in half a day, saw the terror spread from jaw to

forehead like tide reaching dry sand. As my birth partner, she had to unlearn

her instincts, trade in her tender. I remember her pleading palms on the small of my

back: push-pray-push. She, a single mother, and now me the same. There are some lessons

we don’t mean to teach. I have tried with my daughter’s father. But I

refuse to raise a girl who tiptoes around volatile men, and I am

too tired to teach a man how to do good. My mom has said that when my dad left

all she felt was relief. Sometimes I feel as if we are in

a loop. Our experiences coincide, collide, and swallow. This otherness,

this unspoken truth—may Phoenix unwind it, write it new when she becomes mother.

Notes:

This piece is included in Respect the Mic: Celebrating 20 Years of Poetry from a Chicagoland High School, edited by Hanif Abdurraqib, Franny Choi, Peter Kahn, and Dan Sullivan. Published by Penguin Workshop. All poems are copyright of their respective authors.

Source: Poetry (December 2021)