BeLoved

TW: maternal and child death, overdose, genocide, pregnancy in incarceration

Explain to me how you can really, deeply, love another when you’ve loved your own children.

and do not explain with words, or if it has to be with words, use the right ones.

Do not answer with verys and so muches. Use words like obliterate and yearn and God. How can the love of the other be anything more than a soft smile and an open hand when the dream within the dream of losing your child, the absolute theoretical of that, drops you to your knees and courses nausea through your bones.

Hypercoagulable State

Upstairs the neighbor heard a crash-- someone must have dropped something heavy in the downstairs apartment. And then, a wail. The drop was the mother of a newborn baby on the floor, unconscious, bleeding from her ears. Her man at the door was the wail, witnessing. His call was unmistakable-- it was an animal, a cat within his large frame, a deep ancestral shriek. A sound conjured up from some other time, when this can happen, when this has happened. This is happening to someone else. The wail is a noise from a spirit that takes this grief on, and it is not him. Because this isn’t him and his family, this isn’t now. The wail and the crumple. And the sirens follow.

The term hypercoagulable state came to my mind, which is a strange term. It seems like it is not meant for the mouth. After birth, the body, in all its intelligence, increases the blood’s clotting factor, which helps control the normal postpartum bleeding from the uterus. If a person is already at clot risk, like if they have high blood pressure, or if they smoke, or if they are living a life of intense stress and illness, or if this chronic stress has been present and wounding for generations, then this hypercoagulable state can be particularly dangerous. Black maternal mortality in the United States is about four times as high as non-black maternal mortality rates, and this statistic includes the 30 days postpartum, when people are home, unattended, and at clot risk. This is not a non sequitur. Who knows how it went but maybe it went that way. A life for a life, the wounding continues. The surviving in spite of it all continues.

Full Term in Fluvanna State Prison

I walk with a very pregnant person around the prison yard. They are 18, and tiny. They identify as a boy, but don’t talk about preferred pronouns. They don’t say much to me at all but their swollen belly on their small frame says a lot. They want to give birth, even though they know that they will not have much time with this baby afterwards. They are eager for the rite of passage, just like most people are when they are this close. But specifically, they want this baby out, not just out of their body, but out of this place. They don’t feel like they are keeping them safe. They feel like this baby is also locked up. This baby is feeling the lack of safety, the lack of humanity. It is stifling and terrifying and boring. They tell me that they sing to the baby in the shower, quietly. Maybe not even out loud. Their eyes are wet as we talk, their face is shiny with tears. It is so windy and everything is abrasive, it is hard to tell where the tears come from. It’s probably the wind but who knows. The way they have to deal with feeling in here is disjointed. This young parent wants their baby to feel it all, straight through. Cry from pain and be held. I can’t reach out and touch them or hold them as they share with me. So we walk in circles and let the wind hit our eyes and share a lot of silent confusion. I leave this pregnant person’s story and all that is to come behind the locked gates. They would rather be without their baby than have their baby not be free. This is an old, old story.

Norfolk Pieta

A mother heard the news of her son’s fatal overdose, taking life the way fentanyl does, with no warning at all. No countdown. She fell to her knees and clawed at the earth in the moonlit yard. Crawling on hands and knees, pulling out clumps of dew slick grass. Not hair, not hair, grass, keep the clawing and the pulling down, reach down. Grass and earth. Don’t rip yourself apart. Reach down, Fall.

Images of Genocide

The boys in Gaza were bombed side by side. Brothers. All young boys in pairs are brothers to me. They share a language in their gaze,in their movements, in their rank-- who was reassuring who? Who was looking for the mother while the other sucked their thumb and felt protected? When did they both reach for the other? When did they share their last gaze? or did they continue to look away? Or close their eyes. When did their tiny bodies accept it? Or did it not go like that at all.

I weep, and heat courses through me and a need to shake my head back and forth arises, so as to not know too much of this feeling, but I do have a feeling of knowing. What did the mother do when she heard about the motorcycle crash? What did the mother do when she heard the news of her daughter across the ocean, so far away, and now farther? In my knowledge of love for my child, I start to know, and also gratefully, I remain in knowing absolutely nothing.

How can I love another next to that love?

BeHeld

Like a sharp gasp of air

A shock at the now muddled surface

A constriction of breath in the cold deep

not an underwater memory or the imagined

But a bend in time and with a bright beam of clarity it is

Your silent mother holding you

in the early night, sweeping away sweaty strands

Kneeling on the floor, head bowed

Marveling at the pulse in your wrist

warm breath passing through sleep-parted lips

Rhythm of a loose ceiling fan

Gaze consuming your toddler body

Soaking you in a love that you are forever wet with

Within the twitch between sleep and wake

Now glistening and you cannot remember why

Ask the difference between loving and being in love.

Wonder if you are loving or being loved well enough.

Hold a lover close and feel miles away: deep in your body unknowable.

Feel that your father won’t think of you when he dies.

and

be loved by your mother to the marrow

Body alight with the heat of it.