To Childbirth, by Jasmine Bailey

In our hava nagila,
my chair tilted into fire—
you savored my burnt hair,
the way I look
compelled. What didn’t I give
that you asked? That’s

a rhetorical question.
I presented the dowry
of nerves, muscles, blood,
a hope chest of napkins
no longer white.

The chrysanthemum
is more than chlorophyll and cellulose.
But a woman on the rack,
a woman in love,
is a secretless animal.

*

Jasmine Bailey is the author of two poetry collections from Carnegie Mellon University Press: Alexandria (2014), which won the Central New York Book Award, and Disappeared (CMUP 2017), and a chapbook, Sleep and What Precedes It, which won the Longleaf Press Chapbook prize. She was awarded the Laurence Goldstein prize by Michigan Quarterly Review for the best poem published in 2018, and has held fellowships from Colgate University, the Fulbright Foundation, and the Vermont Studio Center, and her poetry, essays, and translations have appeared widely in literary journals. She is a contributing editor for Waxwing Literary Journal.