Teaching My Mother How to Give Birth

by Warsan Shire

One of them pushes my open knees closed. Sit like a girl. I finger the hole in my shorts, shame warming my skin.

Anything that leaves her mouth sounds like sex. Our mother has banned her from saying God’s name.

her front teeth until the bed you shared for seven years seemed speckled with glitter and blood.

you tell people that songs weren’t the same as a warm body or a soft mouth?

were a city exiled from skin, your mouth a burning church.

No one leaves home unless home is the mouth of a shark.

I’m bloated with language I can’t afford to forget.

want to make love, but my hair smells of war and running and running.

I do not know where I am going, where I have come from is disappearing, I am unwelcome and my beauty is not beauty here.

Do they not know that stability is like a lover with a sweet mouth upon your body one second; the next you are a tremor lying on the floor covered in rubble and old currency waiting for its return.

She won’t let me hold her now, when she needs it most.

think of all the images she must carry in her body, how the memory hardens into a tumour. Apathy is the same as war, it all kills you, she says.

But God, doesn’t she wear the world well?

waiting for her sons to come home and raise the loneliness they’d left behind;

then your habooba Al-Sura, God keep her, with three lines on each cheek, a tally of surviving,