BIRTHING EPIC
LYRIK COURTNEY
my birth, as my mother tells it,
was an athenian one.
i was concept before i was blood
token, cognitive ooze sliming
through the gray of her mind’s
fetal darkness, a minnow
silvering my way from pool
to moonlit pool, flooding
the hollow between
her ears.
we discussed this over dinner;
a feast of thighs. our hands,
shiny from the gristle
we’d meticulously separated
from meat. with her wide,
laboring fingers, she recreated
my infantile face in the creases
of her knuckles entirely
from memory, and i watched,
baffled, as she bore the weight
of me.
her narrative and her mother’s
are only dissimilar where
it counts. my grandmother
claims she found me in the river
after a fainting spell.
you were a bass, she said.
a great bass, leaping.
the night of arrival,
in a dream they shared,
my full-grown body dove
like fishing through the window
of my mother’s 1998
honda accord
over the railing of the
howard-frankland bridge.
even now, years later,
i wake swimming in
my own cold sweat
like a whale beached,
knowing it is this body
desperate to escape
the shore.
was an athenian one.
i was concept before i was blood
token, cognitive ooze sliming
through the gray of her mind’s
fetal darkness, a minnow
silvering my way from pool
to moonlit pool, flooding
the hollow between
her ears.
we discussed this over dinner;
a feast of thighs. our hands,
shiny from the gristle
we’d meticulously separated
from meat. with her wide,
laboring fingers, she recreated
my infantile face in the creases
of her knuckles entirely
from memory, and i watched,
baffled, as she bore the weight
of me.
her narrative and her mother’s
are only dissimilar where
it counts. my grandmother
claims she found me in the river
after a fainting spell.
you were a bass, she said.
a great bass, leaping.
the night of arrival,
in a dream they shared,
my full-grown body dove
like fishing through the window
of my mother’s 1998
honda accord
over the railing of the
howard-frankland bridge.
even now, years later,
i wake swimming in
my own cold sweat
like a whale beached,
knowing it is this body
desperate to escape
the shore.
LYRIK COURTNEY is a high school senior who sits at the cultural intersection of African-American and nonbinary gender. The nature of their existence is oftentimes disorienting. A native Floridian, their work is forthcoming in Issue XII of Polyphony H.S. They can be found tweeting at @lyrik_c.