Day 2: Birth

My mother tells be I was born

during her doctors 45 minute lunch break

That I slid out of her

Like the world had been calling for too long

My body

Unwilling to be held within her safest embrace any longer

She said

They named me

A song

That would fear nothing but the end of its voice

Nothing but silence

And the absence of language

And breath

That would fear

Only its nothingness

She said

I was born

In 45 minutes

And became

Fully person

woman and hers

I remember birth differently

I remember the 5 year old version of myself being told and believing the story of my own desecration

How my penis

Had been severed by a team of doctors

That my mother

So disgusted by the coming of me

Strong and male like

Took a knife to my body

To have me made whole

I remember feeling missing

And the phantom itch of a appendage

Iʻd never explored

How the story

And believing it

Made me paper like

An origami sculpture

Waiting to become masterpiece

At someone else’s hand

And imagination

I remember my first period

At 16 and how it was the first true indication that the story

I couldn’t shake from skull

Was nothing more than imagination

And sculpture

That I was woman and

Would die this way

Having never fully known the itch of manhood

The way I imagined

 And this is why I remember birth differently

As less of the sliding from my mother body

Less of being of woman

And of her

And more of the 24 hours spent contorted on a garage couch

The sting of become a image of my own creation

I remember birth

As giving my body to canvas

As the minutes

All 1440 of them turned

Spent becoming a masterpiece

How owning my body

Was turning my skin into vision

And becoming woman meant

Refusing the restrictions of traditions that would refuse me this honor

Of this mark

Of being able to hold story in ink

On skin

Birth was the hour I spent weeping in from of my bathroom mirror naked

the morning I awake to find my tattoo completed

no longer a work of art

but a work of body

and wholly mine

in both imagination and form

birth

was tracing the phases of moon on my pelvis

and remembering that womanhood is not the absence of a phantom itch

it’s the fullness of expression and the courage to have all dreams actualized

birth

was the moment I realized that my body

was full expression and a courageous dream realized

birth was 24 hours

spanning in 22 years

a woman’s body

becoming

her own