I birth a child, and the wet wound never closes. My mother diagnoses postpartum casually as if saying — mail is here, and your name is on it. Explains the drilling is nothing I asked for, overripe nerves happen sometimes.
My mother announces my postpartum casually, says in her day, black women ain’t name the rusted death. I did not ask for the drilling. Postpartum makes for overripe nerves, takes it claws and plucks the mama up out of you.
In my mother’s day, black women ain’t announce the blood rust. Lord willing, the death passed before anyone else could see. Postpartum takes its claws and plucks the mama up outta you and if you ain’t careful, the baby dry rots too.
Lord willing, the wet rust vanishes before anyone else can see it. If not, your voice is a snatched wisp of air and if you ain’t careful, the baby disappears too. Mama just means keeping someone else alive
even if your voice is a snatched wisp of air, as if saying — mail is here, and your name is on it. Mama only means keeping someone else alive. I birth a child, and the wet wound never closes.
Postpartum depression is difficult to endure, and in some ways, even more difficult to talk about. As a Black woman, there is an expectation that I remain strong, available and composed at all times. Writing this pantoum allowed me to use repetition to consider the cycle of harm that is enacted against Black women and disrupt the system of silence that we are encouraged to participate in.
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Maryann Corbett reviews the tenor of ecstasy in Aaron Poochigian’s American Divine. "He has a special bent, in translations and original work, for the rhyming stanza. Stanza patterns are everywhere in his original poems, along with irregular rhyming—half and near and slant—dimeters, trimeters, hexameters, and the four-stress alliterative lines of his verse novel Mr. Either/Or."
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"This is a big and funky and radical project. And so it gets walked out slowly....I think a lot of people who criticize different kinds of projects also don't understand what we mean. We’re putting a million books in prisons, and that's not even what I would imagine to be the kind of scale that I want a project like this to exist on. We want this Freedom Library to serve the same purpose as the libraries you find in people’s homes."
