"mothering song" by Mishal Imaan Syed

You must have learned to mother, a life
belling from beneath your ribcage
and pulling your lungs into the heft of breath.

You must have sung to me, your voice
floating into the budding earlobes
of the creature booting your skeleton

and wrenching a heartbeat from the liquid
quiet. One of us remembers the honeyed ink
in the waiting womb, its blood flushing dark

with iron and tears. But you, I can imagine—
the unfurling of fluid bloating your ankles, you
traced the inscription on the calligraphied wall:

Paradise lies under the feet of a mother.
We yawned apart with the birthing, then
I stretched my tongue for clarion vowels

and you shelved the selves you had once
written out. I must have asked too much
of you: milk, skin, lineage—the clutch

and weave of hair and bone. We came
unraveled, then, together: I ask what is
the fabrication of a child if not this,

the slow unthreading of the vessel—
now a softspun thing? The mother
who knits her creature into the clotting

warmth and yields, once again, as we labor
to wring a pulse from her latticed veins,
the latching valve of her heart.

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Mishal Imaan Syed is a UCLA student studying English, cognitive science, and creative writing. She is also working on her first novel. She is the recipient of the Fred & Edith Herman Memorial Award from the Academy of American Poets, the May Merrill Miller awards for poetry and fiction, and the Clara Rusk Hastings Scholarship. Her work has been published in Epiphany, Solstice Lit, and Raven's Perch. In her free time, she plays piano, daydreams, and fluffs her hair.