I plug the smudged tub in our cold bathroom, open the tap,
unshuck myself from my robe
and wade in lumbering, seven months pregnant.
My son’s uterine kicks make the water rumble.
I‘ve left the window open
and the smell of coffee and rained-on cement lifts up
(just like it did in Maryville, Missouri,
twenty-five years ago when dragging my muddy way to school
I saw heifers shadowed in slatted trucks
and men in flannel shirts eating white piles of heaping food
through the heat-streaked windows of a diner–
paper open, want ads)
it smells like grit and butter and dirt and delicious,
it smells like those women and men rising and saying that prayer–
not the one they said on their knees in front of their neighbors
but the unspoken one they made when they first got up,
the one that lasted as long as a whiff of coffee steam–
when they were coughing and spitting,
when they were dazed and staring,
the one I make for my son now,
that this day will be simple,
a good, warm room to be born into.
Published in Cider Press Review, Volume 26, Issue 5.
Sara Wallace is the author of The Rival (University of Utah Press). Her poetry has appeared in such publications as Agni, Hanging Loose, Michigan Quarterly Review, Poetry Daily, Yale Review and others. As a neurodivergent person with low-frequency hearing loss, she enjoys advocating for people with disabilities however she can. She currently teaches at New York University and lives in Queens.
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