Questions for the Outward Curve of My Stomach, Where I Sometimes Rest My Hand and Pretend to be Pregnant
What have I inherited?
Is it salt?
Why does it sit so heavy in my stomach?
Aunties: why are our words for stomach and soul the same?
I am a woman: I was born with all my future children inside of me.
Is there a DNA test for this?
For salt?
Where does it all go, if I don’t have a daughter?
Will it be the salt people sprinkle on their plums?
A lavender scrub to massage a woman’s legs?
Returned to the earth, to feed a small cucumber garden?
Whose turn will it be to hold these glassy splinters?
Who can I assure the hurt will pass?
Whose hand to hold?
Whose belly to clutch when the jagged edges cut deep inside?
My aunties once scrubbed a chair for two hours after I bled on it.
Header photograph © Hananah Zaheer.
Saba Keramati is a multiracial writer from the San Francisco Bay Area. She recently received her MFA from UC Davis, where she was awarded the Eliot Gilbert Prize and an Honorable Mention in the Celeste Turner Wright Prize sponsored by the Academy of American Poets. Her work appears in Michigan Quarterly Review, Glass: A Journal, and elsewhere, as well as two forthcoming anthologies.