Mia Ayumi Malhotra
X days
I’ve come unmoored from the hours. I crawl into pockets of time where there is none, lose a string of days without noticing. The weeks disappear like a dropped stitch.
I’m shot through with clotted milk, enough to make you gag. There’s a demon in the ointment, electric orange and setting me ablaze.
Yours is the only steady ship in the harbor. The rest of us, going up in flames.
Forgive me. I did not see until now that it was our labor that built this house. Each of my acts, built upon the foundation of yours.
With this, I see all things anew.
X days
At last, we are living in the house we built, have learned its true dimensions. We have walked it through to the end, which I now know is not an end but an interval. Around us, labor takes on different dimensions; pain builds a new roof. The difference is you, a thing of beauty, which I have now seen, held. Behold. What a revelation you are. The whole house, run through with the sound of water. Filled to the rafters with light.
X days
And again, I fall in love, heart spilling over. The revelation that to mind a child is labor, but to mother her is sheer joy. My cup runs over. This miracle cradled in my arms, breathing quietly through the hours. The crown of her head, rung with light. Labia, lips, the voice I sang all the way through. Bring it low. Hold that energy and PUSH. The uterus’ wild red interior, ballooned to contain a galaxy; the moment she broke through; the slippery, muscular force of one life spilling into the next. And the afterpains. And the cramped, shuddery bladder; the heat of a world, collapsing. Fluid, urine, blood. All that strained, swollen tissue. The body, a red awl, breaking through.
Mia Ayumi Malhotra is the author of Isako Isako, winner of the 2017 Alice James Award. She received her MFA from the University of Washington and is a Kundiman and VONA/Voices Fellow. Her poems have appeared in The Yale Review, Indiana Review, The Greensboro Review, Best New Poets, and elsewhere. She lives in the San Francisco Bay Area with her family.
