by Mia Sitterson

Sally Rifkin, *our bodies contain all the water in the room,* digital collage, 2024. Courtesy of the artist.

postpartum: three poems

Mia Sitterson | MAY 2024 | Issue 33

1

The newborn sleeps through coffee grinder and vacuum, because the inside of a uterus is a train station under water, all thrum and whoosh and beat and rumble. Nine months is long enough to hang art on the walls and justify the nail holes. Long enough to know: I live here, this is mine, this is home.

When our world is still and quiet, the baby thrashes and cries. Closes its eyes to open its mouth, stretches its hands to the sky. Give me chaos, it seems to say. Rock me, swing me. Bring your mouth to my small ear and convince me you are the sea. If it is loud, it is home.

When does that change? When do we begin to crave stillness? When do we retreat? When does the world become too loud? We focus on this quiet thing, our breath, and wish for quiet minds. Meanwhile, the inside of our bodies, without skin as buffer, continue their rush, their rhythm, their rock and roll.

2

Baby toes trap lint like nobody’s business, nails grow faster than you can fall asleep, once you finally get the chance, and day is night and night is day, and time unravels still.

Sometimes newborns get pseudo periods, the blood is real, and the hormones, and the uterus, but none of it means what it usually does, us with our twenty-eight days, our mood swings, the weight or mundanity, the inconvenience, the release, all this meaning shoved aside like a top sheet, alongside the crying and its tie to sadness, the bleating like goats, the small mouths unkissing, pursed lips pointed to the nearest source of food.

When they finally make contact, it’s devoid of affection, and full of it too.

3

Toddlers throw screeches out the window like birdseed, and I sprout from the floor in the unit above them. There, in the nursery, I rock an infant in a dark, heated room until I vaporize. Ocean sounds play from a white cylinder in the corner. Last week, the sound was a heartbeat, though the baby’s ear was pressed to my own, real one. This week, our two bodies contain all the water in the room. Up and down and to and fro, as waves crash over the speaker. The stomping rains down on us from above, clumsy pitter-patter, occasional thud. All of us living and breathing and moving, only years and walls and families apart.

Mia Sitterson spends her days supporting families as a postpartum doula & lactation counselor, and her evenings processing her emotions through dance & poetry. A good day is one in which she gets to bask in the sun, rock a baby to sleep, and shimmy. Her poetry, and everything else in her life, begins in her (queer, Jewish, Cuban-American) body, often as a dance. For the last four years, she has hosted a bi-monthly queer poetry group at her home in Washington, DC. Over a hundred people have written poems in this space.

Sally Rifkin is a queer, multidisciplinary artist based in Brooklyn. Primarily utilizing the medium of collage, her work investigates how places take on meaning through memory, nostalgia, identity, and experiences, addressing the question: how do we create the communities we want without repeating the mistakes of the past? By recontextualizing found materials, she creates visual juxtapositions that seek to highlight disjunctures and suggest unexpected affinities.