Draft from 2015, FINALLY deep edited. 5/8/2026 (c)
For Art T
1.
I waited six thousand miles
and twenty-four years for your birth
to some other mother.
With every one of my five miscarriages
my womb emptied
unformed and inert pieces of you.
I seek to enfold you
in rich endometrium mulch—
delay the final push
as you wrench free—
silence
where there should be screaming.
There will never be a natural birth
between us.
2.
Drowning americanos in the coffee shop
you spoke about your childhood in Yerevan—
haunted by a century-old genocide.
You were lyrical about Inanna
and pre-Hellenistic goddesses—
heady describing
Communism’s collapse—
insurrection is your pornography.
You were twenty-four years younger.
So much knowledge,
you even corrected my English.
3.
Abruptly
you kissed me.
Our nose posts clinked together
like a flamenco dancer’s castanets,
a precise, complicated rhythm
one had to live to know.
I inhaled your exhale, lavishly,
slow as savoring champagne, your exhale—
the only air worth breathing.
And for a moment, I thought,
maybe I can do this again.
4.
When you found me
I was storing fat
like an American black bear
preparing for hibernation,
an aging mammalian alchemist
no longer cultivating milk.
Little remained
of the desires rising
behind stalagmites—
this want so sudden, unexpected—
it felt violent.
I am too old for colostrum,
milk gone thin—
I am a fraud of a mother.
With you, what else could I be?
5.
You traversed continents
and wherever you tarried
mothers surfaced—
mini-mothers, mothers-to-be,
monotremes, marsupials,
wounded women
hooked by the chance
to nurture,
to be in your narrative.
I am not the only mother
to tongue-trace
your indecipherable map of ink—
to touch the steel-filled,
the empty piercings
scattered like initiation wounds
from a tribe existing only
in your imagination—
I am not the only mother to think
I could thread them all
with fish wire
and tether you to my skin
connecting us
in a resplendent amalgam of pain.
I was never the only mother
to molest and exalt you.
6.
I tell you—
You are the gist of all my memories.
Every recollection holds you—.
we are two incoherent stories
that merge into a whole.
I tell you—
I was in the shadows at your birth
I watched your naivety break.
It was not my place, not my skill set,
not my doing or undoing
to move you from fugue to joy.
Yet I am but a ghost
of your mother
crossing through.
