Curated by Karolina Zapal
The birthing room is a liminal space. It changes us in ways we imagined and never could have imagined. In the room where I gave birth, I hemorrhaged and a midwife dove elbow-deep into my uterus to retrieve a retained placenta. My daughter was born two weeks early on the only date I didn’t want her to be born due to its connection with a less-than-great day in U.S. history.
As a new mother with a body remolding itself, I entered a new realm of experience. I was reborn.
Physically giving birth to a human is of course only one way of viewing birth and rebirth. The earth is reborn every spring. People are reborn after certain experiences or changes in their lives. In this fraught political time and a rapidly changing climate where an end feels inevitable, what does it mean to welcome birth, to introduce beginnings?
The writers in this folio take us through beginnings and transformations of all kinds. The speaker in Susie Meserve’s poem “Borealis” invokes longing and hope by gazing out the airplane window while leaning on the unfamiliar comfort of a stranger. In “comparison is the thief of joy and all that or whatever,” Mary Gentry writes of the fear that can command a birthing room:
not painful but how can anyone survive this one baby
when he was pulled from me made no sound silence
like a thick heady poison is he okay is he okay is he okay he’s fine
mama, relax
In Olivia Brochu’s prose vignette, “When One Thing Ends,” the speaker and her young son pull weeds and come to acknowledge that no new children will join their family: “An answer that sometimes feels like death, like we are inching closer to death by no longer making new life.” And yet, the earth keeps cycling, we keep giving in to new loves and desires, making new “life” all the time. In “Flowers That Bloom Early & Disappear They Call Ephemeral,” Amy Dryansky reminds us of this:
…where frogs crawl out of the cold mud
to racket their flag of availability, family,
& mate, even after months frozen they’ve not
abandoned desire, & I feel it too, in my body
& the body of the world, how inside us
a kind of clockwork uncoils, loosens,
unticks our minutes, makes space, as if to say,
I’m here, it’s safe, you can open, it’s safe, open.
I was fortunate to peek into these writers’ birthing and rebirthing rooms, to learn from them, to feel, to experience anew. I hope you are as transformed as I was.
Karolina Zapal
Featured Writers:
Samantha Strong Murphey – Two Poems
Evie Calvillo – 3-Body Problem
Susie Meserve – Borealis
Amy Dryansky – Flowers That Bloom Early & Disappear They Call Ephemeral
Mary Fontana – Delivered
Sian Maciejowski – Where All Seas Are the Same
Jessica Barlevi – [After the first child, I knew]
Laura Foley – A Trace of Smoke
Jasmine Soria Sears – Personalized
Leonore Wilson – Their Genesis
Hannah Faith Notess – Viviparity
Jennifer Case – The Machinery Is In Order But We Are Still Fearful
MR Sheffield – Three Poems
Dayna Patterson – Groundhog Day
Therese Gleason – Some Defining Moments . . .
Olivia Brochu – When One Thing Ends
Lisa Ludden Perry – Blue Hours, the NICU
Featured image: Jennifer Case, The Machinery Is In Order But We Are Still Fearful
Karolina Zapal is a Polish American poet, prose writer, and translator. She is the author of the hybrid prose books Notes for Mid-Birth and Polalka. Her writing and translations have appeared in Adi Magazine, Circumference, Exposition Review, FENCE, POETRY, The Massachusetts Review, The Rumpus and other journals. She earned her MFA at Naropa University where she was the Anselm Hollo fellow. She works at the Massachusetts Center for the Book. Find her at karolinazapal.com.