Ana

A story about a waterbirth
A story about the ways water is not
          exactly its location, source, or destination
          not its surface, depth, or volume
          not its contents or a tissue stretched
          between continents
A story about how water exceeds identification
          how its soul is “circulation”

A story about vital needs being ignored by nuns
A story about crowning in a toilet
A story about a family forged at a crowning
A story about being sovereign not royal
A story about bypassing the crown
          of circular narrative by marrying the church
A story about how an institution
          cannot reproduce biological life
A story about how institutions can and do
          reproduce bare life
A story about how the museum
          as an institution is always
          about itself (William Pope L.)

A story about a nun
          and another single mother named Pilar
A story about a midnight waterbirth
          in a convent bathroom
A story about the nuns’ habits gathering like damp
          curtain swag beneath the bathroom stalls
A story about the preponderance
          of blood–the afterbirth that gladdens
the paving stones by the drain

A story about a dried caul
          to protect against (dry) drowning
A story about birthing coworkers
A story about a vocation
          a calling
A story about a convent education
A story about the contents of convents
          subduing the heart
          or its heat, about the arterial sounds
          of rushing water in a rusted pipe
          about crocheting pillow covers to smother
          the needling question of so many remains

A story about children
A story about what makes some nuns
          such hardy bursars
          of so many small burials?

A story about the role of unwed women
          in colonialist expansion
A story about who can counter nunwork
          if not mothers
A story about how nuns make it hard
          but moms make it work
A story about how moms who don’t have help
          help each other out
          help themselves

A story about being a child eating dinner
late at night in another’s mother’s kitchen
A story about neighbors raising
my mother’s child–me
A story about Patricia Hill Collins’
othermothering, about accepting
the fundamental workability
          of asymmetrical love
          that it doesn’t have to be reciprocal
          or nothing

A story about sleep
is like water
a dream of misidentification
with the self
a hatch is another
word for a passage is…

A story about an earlier, ongoing pandemic

A story about how my mom
gave birth to navel genres

submerged her story
in a sub-sub genre
she called “crush depth”

A story about how “passage”
          is another word for para
graph beings and ends with a break
in sense, because submarines
          also breach
          when they go too deep

A story about asking future generations
          how to soften the blows
A story about ceding power
          so we can heal
A story about the way male
          seahorses carry a couple thousand
          babies in their abdominal pouches
A story about how some bodies give birth
          and take life with abandon
          without recourse

A story about how queer
nature is

A story about the way floating suspends
          storyforms
          like location, migration, and belonging

A story about how motile we become after birth

cruising straight down
into “crush depth”



Reprinted from REPS (Ugly Duckling Presse, 2024) with the permission of the author. All rights reserved.