1.

she pushes her kiss into his fleshy cheek, this person who was a part of her, and now breathes outside, each day becoming a new person. how she is expanding through his expansion, how his face is broadening and she can see a big boy coming out of the little baby, who was not long ago a strange alien thing she held in her hands, afraid he would forget to breathe. how she watched him breathe those jagged, sporadic little breaths and imagined those tiny lungs jumping and billowing in fits and starts, and today is 17 months from the time he was cut out of her abdomen and he was startled to see the fluorescent lights, his hand reaching up as it had been in her dream, when she swam and he came upward, and she had wondered why this and not the pushing down, so she had tried to summon down, down, down; but she could only see him dive up as she came up for air; and this is how it was, him being lifted up out of the waters, not down through the canal, her passage remaining intact, though his red-bruised eye was evidence he had, and she had, pushed for 72 hours until it was too-much-blood and too-fast contractions; all of this she did for him and here he was, smiling and forgetting it all; or never having known any of it.

2.

each day he awakens with a new type of sound
shakes a maraca
studies how a muscle works
tries a syllable
each day becoming someone.

3.

I am writing an essay about being a new mother and losing sleep and not having someone else to lullaby and hold and teach the baby and being in the middle of an anti-immigration Trump era that is literally separating my family, how all of that is enough to lose sleep, but how do I organize that.

4.

maybe I should just call it “Trump is separating my family” and get headlines, I could use the wow of it because Cuba is always wow in some way or another, a fascination or a terror to the USA, all its golden era and now its pariah status.

5.

maybe it’s “I can’t get any sleep” and all the reasons in bullet point about why I can’t sleep.

6.

single-motherhood means the time to do each thing is slipped in the narrow cracks between nap and awake, full and hungry, spit up and burping, playing activity 1, 2, 3 and 100.  And lots of kisses.

7.

single-motherhood means working 24 hours a day while also working the job that keeps the roof over your heads and not being able to depend on anyone else for anything.

8.

I am dreaming of a day when I can dream for more than 5 minutes at a time.

9.

I am in dire need of a shower.

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Aimee Suzara is a Filipino-American poet, playwright, and performer whose mission is to create poetic and theatrical work about race, gender, and the body to provoke dialogue and social change. Her first full-length book, SOUVENIR, was released in February 2014 (WordTech Editions) and was a Willa Award Finalist in 2015. Her plays A HISTORY OF THE BODY and TINY FIRES were selected as Finalists for the Bay Area Playwright’s Festival. A HISTORY OF THE BODY was also commissioned by the East Bay Community Foundation and supported by the National Endowment for the Arts.  She has collaborated with Amara Tabor Smith and Deep Waters Dance Theater for the food-justice themed dance theater piece, Our Daily Bread. Her poems appear in numerous journals and anthologies such as Kartika Review, 580 Split, Lantern Review and Walang Hiya: Literature Taking Risks Toward Liberatory Practice, Check the Rhyme: An Anthology of Female Poets and Emcees and Poets (Lit Noire Press) and her chapbooks, the space between and Finding the Bones (Finishing Line Press). She’s been featured as a spoken word artist nationally, including at Stanford, Mt. Holyoke College, Portland State University, University of Miami and UC Santa Cruz.  Suzara received her M.F.A. in Creative Writing at Mills College.  An advocate for the intersection of arts and literacy, she teaches at San Francisco State University and other universities and colleges, is the Spoken Arts Director at Ruth Azawa School of the Arts and leads workshops in poetry and performance for youth and adults. www.aimeesuzara.net

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Raising Mothers is a free online literary magazine for BIWOC and non-binary parents of color. As little as $1 a month goes a long way towards supporting our editorial staff and contributors while keeping us ad-free. Become a patron today!

When my son calls out
for one of his many night wakings
he seeks my breast in the dark
and finds it, suckling
until he falls back asleep.
In this ritual
that reminds us both
of his belonging
to this body,
we are more animal
than human.

Each time, I notice
how his tiny body stretches further,
his head filling more space
in the cradle of my arm,
and I gather him like a cloud,
knowing one day I will no longer.

Each time, I recall:
once, he lived inside this deflated belly,
now lined up against his.
Only 17 months ago he was head down,
pressing my cervix till his left eye bruised red
and red flooded my legs till I thought something
was falling out
and I said GO and we went to the hospital.
And they drugged me up. And cut him out.

After waiting so long, he arrived so fast,
as though someone had skipped ahead in the story.
The contractions
that seemed they would bleed my life away
ceased by the serums they injected.
That was the first relief;
the second: his first cry.
His first sound into this world.

There I saw, as though looking at someone else,
this very body, mine, stretched, then sliced open,
my guts shining on the table while they wrenched him out
with hands and metal tools hovering and diving like birds.
I strained to see, through blurry plastic and tilted eyeglasses
what I could not feel.
Did he first reach his hand up
like a rock star? Or was it the head,
cord wrapped around his neck before
the first breath
this skinny red-faced alien
who, when placed on my chest,
stared at me and we looked,
quietly, at each other
as they sewed my senseless skin together.
Some in the American-obsessive-manner would say
that I am not training him right,
that he will never learn to sleep alone 
if I let him nurse through the night,
if I let him sleep beside me.
But one day he will neither seek my breast,
nor me.
How sad it must be when
the one who lived inside you
one day pushes you away.
Not needing you anymore.

It is the story of life.
We were one, and are becoming two.

The singers were wrong
that two hearts beating as one
was about lovers.
They forgot about us,
as our sons leave
behind their mothers.

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Aimee Suzara is a Filipino-American poet, playwright, and performer whose mission is to create poetic and theatrical work about race, gender, and the body to provoke dialogue and social change. Her first full-length book, SOUVENIR, was released in February 2014 (WordTech Editions) and was a Willa Award Finalist in 2015. Her plays A HISTORY OF THE BODY and TINY FIRES were selected as Finalists for the Bay Area Playwright’s Festival. A HISTORY OF THE BODY was also commissioned by the East Bay Community Foundation and supported by the National Endowment for the Arts.  She has collaborated with Amara Tabor Smith and Deep Waters Dance Theater for the food-justice themed dance theater piece, Our Daily Bread. Her poems appear in numerous journals and anthologies such as Kartika Review, 580 Split, Lantern Review and Walang Hiya: Literature Taking Risks Toward Liberatory Practice, Check the Rhyme: An Anthology of Female Poets and Emcees and Poets (Lit Noire Press) and her chapbooks, the space between and Finding the Bones (Finishing Line Press). She’s been featured as a spoken word artist nationally, including at Stanford, Mt. Holyoke College, Portland State University, University of Miami and UC Santa Cruz.  Suzara received her M.F.A. in Creative Writing at Mills College.  An advocate for the intersection of arts and literacy, she teaches at San Francisco State University and other universities and colleges, is the Spoken Arts Director at Ruth Azawa School of the Arts and leads workshops in poetry and performance for youth and adults. www.aimeesuzara.net

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Raising Mothers is a free online literary magazine for BIWOC and non-binary parents of color. As little as $1 a month goes a long way towards supporting our editorial staff and contributors while keeping us ad-free. Become a patron today!

 



     When my brothers
turned seven, my father passed 
on to them silk carp blazing
with the colors of the sun.
The banners gleamed
as he spoke of carp,
their golden muscle.
     At night, he paced 
outside, circling our home 
seven times. He prayed
that his sons would sprout 
armored scales, thrash upwards 
into the heavens.  
     As children, we stuffed 
the carp into toy chests, buried 
them in sand boxes. Tattered gold 
clung to the tips of tree forts,
then fluttered in junk heaps,
their silken tails picked
apart by gulls.  
               This fifth of May,
my son sits on the couch, 
downing Lucky Charms,
eyes fixed on the television.
               The nature show warns 
of trash fish—murky waters roiling 
with Asian carp. My son laughs 
as they launch to the surface, 
scales glinting like prisms.
               Cameras pan 
to newly grated spillways, 
the stacks of gleaming bodies 
blasted from ponds, their pearly
mouths. 
               Reaching 
    for the darkened screen, 
my son calls out koi, koi, 
pleading for their return. 

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Sayuri Ayers is a native of Columbus, Ohio. The daughter of Chinese and Japanese immigrants, her work explores identity, motherhood, and mental health. Her prose and poetry appear in The Account, Entropy, SWWIM, Hobart, The Pinch, and other literary journals. She is the author of two chapbooks: Radish Legs, Duck Feet (Green Bottle Press) and Mother/Wound (forthcoming from Full/Crescent Press.) Sayuri is a Kundiman Fellow and VCCA Resident. In 2020, she was awarded the Ohio Arts Council’s Individual Excellence Award in creative writing. You can find her at sayuriayers.com.

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Raising Mothers is a free online literary magazine for BIWOC and non-binary parents of color. As little as $1 a month goes a long way towards supporting our editorial staff and contributors while keeping us ad-free. Become a patron today!