Carrier

I realize now that I have always been an eggshell,threatening to splinter and open and deliver my yolkinto the pan of this world.

Was I so breakable before this childfilled me? I do not remember walkingso carefully, so slowly, as I do now,imagining the swimmer, gyroscopicin his bowl, sloshing at every sudden movement.

My mother had a set of wooden dolls,given to her by her motherand her mother before her.

They hinged at the middle and openedto smaller and smaller figures,the same shape but painted in different patterns.

We are like this, too, we women,painted shells that house one another,person inside person inside person.A dizzy perpetuity.

The world, doll in doll, releases gradually—we emerge,webbed in blood and white from women,cracked in half by birth. Beyond one womb, another, another,the living and dead all nesting,each of our faces and words and storiesechoes of what came before.

At the beginning,the first mother,tall and wide and whole.

At the end, we hope,a tiny son, who only contains himself.