My awakening in the still-dark of morning was
non.
consensual.
Contractions within the womb of my creativity
tightening, aching, rippling
towards something inevitable,
brought awareness…
awakened awareness.
Creative birth was imminent.
I lay in the quiet comfort of a hotel bed
fit for a queen.
I shuddered with humor
at the idea of those pristine,
crisp white sheets
drenched in the blood-ink
of this becoming.
The bleeding of words.
The ecstatic spilling.
The mess of it all.
The miracle.
I tossed and turned in resistance,
grasping at the comical, deluded belief
that creative labor could be slowed,
controlled,
stopped, even.
I’ve been birthing verses
since they first placed a number two pencil
in my hand
and taught me to make it dance on paper.
Maybe even before.
Follicles of language
waiting deep.
Tiny vessels swelling with meaning,
straining toward the light.
But this morning…
this labor…
I am in the French Quarter.
One of the many chapters
in the celebratory return
to self.
And the words
will
not
let
me
rest.
As the lines swirled closer together,
tightening in rhythm,
pressing one against the next,
the contractions intensified.
And I finally
met surrender
with a soft smile.
There was a spark of excitement in me!
A flicker of delight at the thought
that this forced awakening
was offering me the privilege
of watching the sunrise
spill across Toulouse
from the balcony.
Between the waves,
I placed bare feet to floor,
my body still steeped in dream
and freshly ruptured thought.
I carried myself to the door.
The early morning July air
in New Orleans
betrayed the darkness.
There is no coolness here.
Only the wet heat,
the same soaked, steaming ache
that swells beneath the skin
of a woman in labor.
I sank into the cradle
of a plastic rattan chair.
Its woven lacing warm beneath me,
unyielding but familiar.
And that’s when I saw it;
a dusty pink sateen ribbon
looped beneath the arm of the chair,
dangling softly
off the edge of the balcony
as if it too
had slept there all night
and now stirred to witness the dawn.
I tried to remember
if I’d seen it before I slept,
but it didn’t matter.
It delighted me.
I scooped it into my hands
and wrapped it gently around my neck,
a scarf that matched the morning.
I clumsily attempted
to capture the orange-pink hue
cresting over the rooftops
that line Burgundy…
a futile effort
to bottle light
with the flat, cold eye
of my phone.
Some colors are only meant
to be seen with the eyes.
Some moments only to be felt
with the chest cracked open.
The orange-pink of new light
blooming into the navy remnants
of night’s last exhale,
and I, mid-labor,
watching dawn emerge
as if she, too, had something to birth.
That’s when the poem began to crown.
Jagged lines surfaced first,
a feral liturgy of
incongruity…
No!
A righteous hypocrisy!
Art that sears as it heals,
that cauterizes wounds
by naming them out loud.
There is magic here.
There is me here.
Magic through me
here.
I sit beneath the still-glowing streetlamp,
an unaware witness
casting light upon this
balcony maternity ward
where I am giving birth
in plain sight.
Below,
a man stumbles slightly,
caught between realities,
glancing down at the joint in his hand
as if wondering,
“Is this even working?”
or
“Is it working too well?”
He stares, then staggers,
then inhales again
as the smoke wraps
like gauze around his face.
I chuckle.
Not unkindly.
I consider the question
and find that I don’t think
the answer mattered.
I’ve been taken on a poet’s side quest,
drawn into the contrast
of our mornings.
Mine, a holy awakening,
veins clear, breath deep,
body humming with life.
His, perhaps
the soft stagger
between forgetting and remembering.
I wandered Bourbon Street last night
sober,
alert,
alive!
Passing the echoes
of all of my own
all-night benders.
Now, in the cresting morning,
they are still curled in upstairs rooms,
still tucked behind shuttered windows.
And here I am, now,
birthing a poem at sunrise.
Or maybe two.
It seems I have become
a twin mother
at the corner of Toulouse and Burgundy.
One poem emerging
in ink and blood,
the other quietly forming
as a reflection of self:
To be this alive,
in this body,
in this city,
with my art,
with my heart,
I weep.
Maybe this isn’t
a story about the birth of a poem.
Maybe it isn’t even the story
of a pair of poems.
Maybe Sunrise on Toulouse
is the rebirth
of the poet.
