Teaching My Mother How to Give Birth

by Warsan Shire

He smiles like he has pennies hidden in his cheeks.

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

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

Look at all these borders, foaming at the mouth with bodies broken and desperate. I’m the colour of hot sun on the face, my mother’s remains were never buried. I spent days and nights in the stomach of the truck; I did not come out the same. Sometimes it feels like someone else is wearing my body.

I know a few things to be true. 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. My body is burning with the shame of not belonging, my body is longing. I am the sin of memory and the absence of memory.