The Language of Our Mothering
–For Kai
by Avery Irons
Before you were born,
a small, but solid enough, part of me
feared that blood was the only ingress.
And then I held you,
and with blue-gray eyes,
so unlike my brown-black ones,
you peered up at me,
and I was exulted—
you knew me.
_____
Our mothers called across
with accents dipped in the souths of so many lands,
trickling like grassland streams,
and rough as waters not crossed for generations,
chitchatting in the language of our mothering.
“Gal, don’t let them nurses poke your baby that much.”
“A child named after the ocean gon test you.”
“No matter, every ocean has a shore.”
“Look at all that hair.”
“They gon brown up nicely.”
“But remember how Myrtle’s first girl didn’t.”
“And neither did yours, Maddy.”
“Either way, baby, they real pretty.”
“And they’re ours.”
_____
“Sister-mother,” they bade me,
(And I promised.)
“Every night, lay them on your heart
so they can always find you
in the bass of their comfort music
and the strike of their feet walking,
however they will, through this life.
And when their blood is quieting,
they will already know to follow
the wake of their own heartbeats
home to you. To us.”
Avery Irons is the author of the novel Belonging to the Air, winner of the 2025 Screen Door Press Prize. Her novella “Glass Men” won Big Fiction Magazine’s Novella Prize. She was born and (mostly) raised in central Illinois. Avery currently lives in upstate New York where she writes historical fiction about Black families and Queer folks. Find her at averyirons.com or on IG at averyironsink.
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