Dear Body –

If birth is a story, maybe I can write it backwards and forwards. Maybe it will change my life – even the parts that feel beyond reach. Maybe I can gather the threads and weave them into a nest. Or an altar, in remembrance of how things could have been.

In another life I wake in the middle of the night and stumble to the bathroom. Behind me trails a thick, wet river. I press my nose into its current and sniff, suffused with the smell of the sea.

In this other life the house fills with women – mothers who came from war, who lost their homes and countries. Who were denied hospital admittance because of their race, who were made to stand in hallways because there was no room in the ER. 

Mothers who gave birth behind barbed wire, imprisoned in the desert, land arid and wrecked by wind. Mothers who stood in line for milk, who put their babies in washbasins and covered them with blankets to save them from sandstorms. Who miscarried in horse stalls because there was no hospital. 

They crowd into the room, holding me as I break, sustaining me with their strength, their stories.

In this other world I am wild like the sea, keening and streaming with sweat. She’s coming, I can feel her, she’s here – wrapped in a thick, jelly-slick umbilical cord, which we gently unwind from her neck. 

It’s her! they say and press her to my chest. They massage her vigorously, the cord pulsating like a living thing, and she is blue then purple then pink and finally a wild red, and at last she gurgles and begins to cry. We have passed through death and emerged wet and bleeding.

In this other world I surge with colostrum and the drops of this sticky new life are thick and yellow, beading on the nipple, and in this way we are begun again. Through blood, through water. 

Through birth, we are torn apart and stitched back together. 

Mia Ayumi Malhotra is the author of Notes from the Birth Year, winner of the Bateau Press BOOM Chapbook Contest, and Isako Isako, a California Book Award finalist and winner of the Alice James Award, the Nautilus Gold Award, a National Indie Excellence Award, and a Maine Literary Award. She is the recipient of the Hawker Prize for Southeast Asian Poetry and the Singapore Poetry Prize, and her poems have appeared in numerous journals and anthologies, including The Yale Review, Indiana Review, and The World I Leave You: Asian American Poets on Faith and Spirit. A Kundiman Fellow and founding editor of Lantern Review, she teaches and lives in the San Francisco Bay Area.