Ain’t I a Mother

My sister slipped onto the earth and sealed the marriage my
being born helped birth. Broken union from the start, desperate
and sharp as a second baby’s first breath. As girl children,
we sang our parents’ lesser natures to sleep, in the dark
found our own way to pray. Five children followed, our mother
a mother seven times over. God’s number, she told us,
of completion. Mathematic motherhood, permutation.
I learned to add and subtract in dingy grocery store aisles,
heels hit sore by my mother’s cart, never full enough for
feeding. I learned to read from lists like scripture, like prayers,
like promises to preserve the better parts of what children
we could become without this hunger, without this version
of earth. At home, girl children learned mothering as morning
ritual. A wailing, a sharp start to the aching day,
an awakening to our mother’s needs, which were our needs
permutated. Dishes, children, diapers, children, dust and
dirt children lugging in water, washing down the remains
of other days and other mothers. When I was seven,
my grandmother, paternal, was sent to the hospital.
Even before, she would stand in the window of her house,
and I would wave, and she would look past me, and my father
would not explain why. Broken stories on this and all sides.
Mathematic memory, dividing the unions that birthed
us, adding steps and halves and degrees removed, attempting
to formulate completion. I have not given birth, but
I have risen seven days to count my siblings’ small breaths.
To count their lives slipping toward promised fullness. And then my own.