Mother Doesn’t Know Mnemosyne

whose capacity to bear the next generation murmurs to the Mother in them. 

as if to keep the body from collapsing. 

The vertebrae protrude along her lumbar. She tucks her leg under, twisting it at the ankle around the other leg, letting the big toe of one foot grab on the sole of the other foot. The arm under her body wraps around her neck, resting the hand on her shoulder. The bones of this hand are visible. The skin, so thin it’s almost translucent, holds her lump of bones together into the shape of a skeleton.

You come near her. Close enough for you to see her chest rise, and fall, then rise again, and fall again. You stay there. It doesn’t have to be closer. It should not be closer. What you need to see, you have already seen. Closer might be too close. A sense of a bodily gesture might be evoked. A hug maybe. Or a kneeling down. Or a touch of your hand on her hand. 

Or, you might hear a sound. A kind of noise that has escaped the blockage of an air passage. A passage that has atrophied. Not the bronchi of the lungs, not the trachea, not the larynx, nor the mouth or the nose. It’s not a fragment of a snore. It’s life crossing its expiring date. The sound of lingering expiration.

They call the baby em, like “little brother” or “little sister”.

Anything that small needed only to be identified as “the smaller one”.

SO2: sounds of an infant laughing

SO2a: sound of low boiling

Đàn đây /here is the instrument

Em ở đó /you / baby sister / child/ are there

Đứng /standing

Em đã sinh ra /you / baby sister / child / have (been) born(e)

SO6a, SO6b: heartbeats and growling

LÀM MẸ / being / making / mother